Passing from Europe, we come to Austral-Asia, where Great Britain, among others, possesses no less than three penal colonies. It will not be contended that New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Norfolk Island, were established either with economically trading or political objects; that, in point of fact, they were established in any other sense than as metropolitan prisons, for the safe keeping, punishment, and moral reclamation and reform of those _quasi_ incorrigible offenders, those criminal pests, by which the health of society was distempered, and its safety endangered in the parent state. Therefore, whatever the military or other expenditure incurred, it must be as much an obligation in its supreme or corporate capacities upon the state benefited, as the support of the criminal jurisdiction at home in all its ramifications, from the chief judges of the land down to the lowest turnkey at Newgate. We need not stop to enquire in what proportion the manufacturing system, with the immoral schools of radicalism, irreligionism, and Anti-corn-Law Cobdenism, have contributed to people the penal settlements, and, _pro tanto_, to aggrieve the national treasury. Certain it is, and a truth which will not be questioned, that by far the largest share of that criminal refuse has been cast off by and from the manufacturing districts; and of which, therefore, the colonial trade portion indirectly contributed should be rateably the minimum, as compared with foreign trade. In his _Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire_, Mr Montgomery Martin remarks of New South Wales, that "it should be observed that a large part of the military force is required to guard the prisoners." Let us take the number of troops so employed at 2600, which will not be far from the mark, the corresponding home reserve of which will be 1300 more, and we then arrive, with the help of Mr Cobden's arithmetic, and starting from his own fixed datum of total charge, at a sum, in round numbers, of £265,000 army expenditure for the three penal colonies; the more considerable proportion of which must at least be set down as arising indirectly from foreign trade, and certainly far the least from colonial, so far as chargeable upon either.