The want of a due consideration of the difference in relative condition of labourers at home and labourers in new countries has led to some serious errors[E] in the formation and execution of some of our plans of colonization. Such a scheme as that of penal colonization could never have been adopted if the case of the working class in both countries had been understood. Besides the many other objections which might be and have been forcibly urged, there must remain the insurmountable one that labour is better rewarded in a new colony than at home. It does not appear that any arbitrary severity, short of the infliction of such life-long misery as no crime can deserve, can counteract the natural law by which the labourer is more prosperous in our penal colonies than in England. They are places of privilege, and the carrying him there is putting him in a condition of privilege, sooner or later, however severely we may punish him for any terminable period. This is so notoriously the case, that it has become matter of very serious consideration how the lot of the convict can be rendered harder, and be made known at home to be so; and arrangements have been made, within a short period, by which the disproportion in the lot of the innocent and the guilty is considerably lessened. Still, however far the convict may be placed below the virtuous emigrant in the scale of comfort, no power can, in the present state of our labour-market, prevent his being much better off than the independent labourer at home. The power of rulers may ordain chains, whipping, and other penalties to the convict; but it cannot prevent his having, during a pressing demand for his labour, that abundance of the necessaries of life which the virtuous labourer cannot obtain at home. Bob Castle[F] would not now, perhaps, be able to purchase an estate on which his honest brother Frank was a labourer; but Bob, however he might have been punished for seven or fourteen years, could not but have a fairer prospect before him at the end of that time than honest Frank would have had in England. This necessity forms, of itself, a conclusive argument against penal colonization as a secondary punishment. That mode of punishment can never command respect or success which wanders so far from the principle of retribution as to inflict studied miseries as a set-off against advantages which cannot be excluded. ----- Footnote E: