At present, there are, or at least should be, above 5000 criminals annually transported from the British islands.[12] The cost of settling a free labourer in Australia is about £16 a-head. To send 16,000 free labourers with these 5000 criminals would cost just £256,000 a-year: call it £300,000 yearly, to make room for the probable increase of criminals, from the growing necessities or depravity of the mother country, and provide for the extra and unavoidable expenses of an infant establishment, and the transportation question is at once solved, a great relief is afforded to the distressed labourers of the parent state, and a certain market for our manufactures provided, which will double every two or three years, as long as the system is continued. Let government, by an order in council, propose these terms to the colonies, and we shall see if any of them will refuse them. If none will close with them, let them at once establish a new colony on these principles, in some unoccupied part of New Holland. In twelve months, there will be a race for who is to get a share of the fertilising stream. Sixteen thousand free settlers, and five or six thousand convicts, annually sent to any colony, would cause its numbers to double every two, and its prosperity to triple in value every three years. Everything would go on in a geometrical progression. It would soon rival California in progress and reputation. Capital would rapidly follow this scene of activity and progress. Moneyed men are not slow in discovering where labour is plentiful and comparatively cheap, and where their investments are doubled in amount and value every two or three years. A colony thus powerfully supported by the parent state would soon distance all its competitors: while the Cape, New Zealand, and Australia were slumbering on with a population doubling every ten years, from the tardy and feeble support of free emigrants on their own resources, the establishment thus protected would double in two or three. Voluntary emigrants would crowd to the scene of activity, progress, and opulence. The 20,000 persons annually sent out would immediately become consumers of our manufactures to the extent of £150,000 a-year:[13] and this rate would be doubled the very next year! At the end of five or six years, it would amount to £800,000 or £900,000 annually. What a relief at once to the manufacturers of Great Britain, now labouring so severely under the combined effect of foreign competition and a declining home market, and the starving peasantry of Ireland, where half a million of stout labourers--admirable workmen in a foreign country, though wretched ones in their own--are pining in hopeless destitution, a burden upon their parishes, or flocking in ruinous multitudes to Liverpool and Glasgow.