But by far the most powerful cause, which has been in operation for above a quarter of a century, in destroying the beneficial effects of the system of transportation, and substituting the worst possible consequences in their stead, has been the sending out of convicts _in too great a proportion to the free population_, and the consequent necessity for substituting the _gang for the assignment system_. This is a matter of the very highest, indeed of paramount importance; and it may safely be affirmed that, unless a remedy is found for it, all efforts made to render the system of transportation palatable to the colonies will prove nugatory. Fortunately the means of remedying that evil are not only easy, but, comparatively speaking, cheap, and perfectly efficacious; and they promise, while they remedy the above-mentioned evil, to confer, in other respects, signal benefits both on the colonies and the mother country. New South Wales was originally selected, and not without sufficient reasons, as the place for the establishment of penal colonies, because the distance of it from the mother country, and the length of the voyage, rendered it a very difficult matter either for runaway convicts, or those who had served their time, to get home again. Once sent out, you were, in the great majority of cases, clear of them for ever. This circumstance was no disadvantage, but rather the reverse, to the colony, and certainly a very great advantage to the parent state, as long as the number of convicts annually sent out was inconsiderable, and the whole convict population formed a small minority to the number of free settlers. When the whole number committed a-year in England was 4500, and in Scotland under 100, as it was in Great Britain in 1804 or 1805, the settlement of convicts on the distant shores of Australia worked well. They were glad to get the 300 or 400 annually sent out; they were benefited by their forced labour; and the free settlers were in sufficient numbers to keep them with ease in subjection, and prevent their habits from contaminating those of the free inhabitants of the colony. But when the commitments from Great Britain and Ireland had risen to 50,000 or 60,000 a-year, and the convicts sent out to 3000 or 4000 annually, as they have done for some years past, the case was entirely altered. The polluted stream became much too large and powerful for the land it was intended to fertilise; it did more harm than good, and became the object of uniform and undisguised aversion.