personal injury to an individual, is infinitely greater than that caused by a whole series of depredations on property if unaccompanied by violence. In the quinquennial period (1857-1861), the number of persons for trial at Assizes and Quarter Sessions, charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, felonious wounding, malicious wounding and assault, amounted to 1451; whilst in the next quinquennial period (1862-1867), the number of commitments for these offences had risen to 1712; and herein lay the _raison d'etre_ for the widespread alarm which, in 1862 and 1863 especially, may be said to have amounted to panic. Not only were such crimes more frequent than had formerly been the case, but they began to be marked by a degree of violence[224] which argued that a peculiarly desperate class of criminal was abroad; and such indeed was the actual state of affairs, occasioned by the temporary breakdown of the penal system and consequent upon the discontinuance of the practice of shipping the most dangerous criminals across the seas. Before the abolition of transportation, the career of the criminal was generally brief unless he confined his attention to petty depredations, or unless he was particularly skilful in avoiding capture; a felon once caught was given little chance of repeating his offence. If he escaped the gallows he was as a rule removed from the scene of his temptations, never to return; and the labours of the police were far less arduous as long as distant colonies were content to absorb the dregs of our population, and as long as the press-gang claimed a large proportion of our vagabonds and neer-do-weels. Impressment, however, practically ceased in 1835; and Australasia soon grew weary of the refuse which we were yearly depositing on her shores. Between 1840 and 1845 as many as seventeen thousand convicts were sent to Van Diemen's Land alone, and in one year more than four thousand felons were transported to Australia: the result was that the supply exceeded the demand, and the colonists, though not blind to the advantages of a moderate supply of free labour, began to protest warmly against the wholesale importation of such eminently undesirable neighbours. A large public meeting was held at Sydney in 1850, at which it was unanimously decided to petition Her Majesty to procure the immediate discontinuance of transportation; the British Government at once consented, and after 1852 no more convicts were sent to New South Wales, Tasmania, or South Australia.[225] Morally bound, as it was, to comply with the request of the Colonists, the government found itself impaled on the horns of a dilemma: about nine thousand persons actually under sentence of transportation lay awaiting disposal in the Hulks, and the number was steadily increasing. It was impossible to set them at liberty; there was no room in the English prisons; and there was nowhere to send them to except Western Australia, which, though still willing to