But this only shifted the seat of the evil, and augmented its intensity. The convicts, now swelled to above four thousand a-year, could not be kept at home; they required to be sent somewhere, and where was that place to be? Van Diemen's Land was selected, being the most southernly portion of New Holland, and of course the farthest removed from this country; and thither nearly the _whole convicts_ of Great Britain and Ireland, soon above thirty-five hundred annually in number, were sent for several years. The consequence of this prodigious influx of criminals into an infant colony, so far removed from the parent state that it cost £20 a-head to send a common labourer there--and of course no free emigration in proportionate numbers could be expected without public aid--might easily have been anticipated. Government did nothing to encourage the simultaneous settlement of free settlers in that distant land, thus flooded with convicts, or so little as amounted to nothing. The consequence was, that, ere long, _three-fifths_ of the inhabitants of the colony were convicts. Every one knows, none could have failed to anticipate the consequences. The morals of the settlement, thus having a majority of its inhabitants convicts, were essentially injured. Crimes unutterable were committed; the hideous inequality of the sexes induced its usual and frightful disorders; the police, how severe and vigilant soever, became unable to coerce the rapidly-increasing multitude of criminals; the most daring fled to the woods, where they became bush-rangers; life became insecure; property sank to half its former value. So powerful, and evidently well-founded, were the representations made on the subject to the legislature, that it became evident that a remedy must be applied; and this was done by an order in council in 1844, which suspended entirely for two years the transportation of _male_ convicts to the colonies. That of females was still and most properly continued, in the hope that, by doing so, the inequality of the sexes in Australia might in some degree be corrected.