Just before his departure for New Zealand, he had addressed an official letter to the governor, calling his attention to the present state of Paramatta and its neighbourhood, as far as it related to its public morals and police, and especially with regard to the female convicts, of whom upwards of one hundred and fifty, besides seventy children, were employed in a government factory there, and whose condition, as far as we can venture to describe it, may be gathered from the following passage. The scene is painful; it is the dark side of our colonial history; but those who will not listen to these recitals can know but little of the obligations which society is under to such men as Howard and Samuel Marsden, or to heroic women, such as Mrs. Fry. In his letter to the governor he says: "The number of women employed at the factory is one hundred and fifty; they have seventy children. There is not any room in the factory that can be called a bed-room for these women and children. There are only two rooms, and these are both occupied as workshops; they are over the jail, and are about eighty feet long and twenty wide. In these rooms there are forty-six women daily employed, twenty spinning wool upon the common wheel, and twenty-six carding. There are also in them the warping-machine, etc., belonging to the factory. These rooms are crowded all the day, and at night such women sleep in them as are confined for recent offences, amongst the wheels, wool, and cards, and a few others, who have no means whatever of procuring a better abode. The average number of women who sleep in the factory is about thirty in the whole. Many of these women have little, and some no bedding; they all sleep on the floor. There is not a candle or bedstead belonging to the factory. I do not deem it either safe or prudent that even thirty women should sleep in the factory, which has been crowded all day with working people; the air must be bad and contagious. Were the magistrate to compel even half the number of women, with their children, to sleep in the factory which belong to it, they could not exist. Not less than one hundred and twenty women are at large in the night to sleep where they can."