It has been often observed, by those practically acquainted with the working of the transportation system in the colonies, that the Irish convicts were generally the best, and the Scotch, beyond all question, the worst who arrived. This peculiarity, so widely different from, in fact precisely the reverse of, what has been observed of the _free_ settlers from these respective countries, in every part of the world, has frequently been made the subject of remark, and excited no little surprise. But the reason of it is evident, and, when once stated, perfectly satisfactory. The Scotch law, administered almost entirely by professional men, and on fixed principles, has long been based on the principle of transporting persons only who were deemed irreclaimable in this country. Very few have been sent abroad for half a century, from Scotland, who had not either committed some very grave offence, or been four or five times, often eight or ten times, previously convicted and imprisoned. In Ireland, under the moderate and lenient sway of Irish county justices, a poacher was often transported who had merely been caught with a hare tucked up under his coat. Whatever we may think of the justice of such severe punishments for trivial offences, in the first instance, there can be but one opinion as to its tendency to lead a much better class of convicts from the Emerald Isle, than the opposite system did from the shores of Caledonia. Very probably, also, the system of giving prisoners "repeated opportunities of amendment," as it is called in this country--but which, in fact, would be more aptly styled "renewed opportunities for depravity"--has, from good but mistaken motives, been carried much too far in Scotland. Be this as it may, nothing is more certain than that the substitution of a race of repeatedly convicted and hardened offenders, under the milder system of punishment in Great Britain, during the last twenty years, for one comparatively uninitiated in crime, such as were formerly sent out, has had a most pernicious effect on the character of the convicts received in the colonies, and the sentiments with which their arrival was regarded.