Within three years of the establishment of the new system, already described at length, by which transportation was to be robbed of all its evils, the most deplorable results showed themselves. The condition of Van Diemen's Land had become most lamentable. It was filled to overflowing with convicts. There were in all 25,000, half of whom were still in the hands of government; and besides these numbers there were three thousand pass-holders waiting for hire, but unable to obtain employment. The latter would be reinforced by as many more in the year immediately following. The colony itself was on the verge of bankruptcy: its finances embarrassed, its trades and industries depressed. With all this was a wholesale exodus of all classes of free people--the better class, to avoid the ruin that stared them in the face, and working men, because higher wages were offered elsewhere in the neighbouring colonies. Already, in fact, the new system of probation had broken down. It had given rise to evils greater than any which it had been expected to replace. Not only was Van Diemen's Land itself on the brink of ruin, but the consequences to the convicts were almost too terrible to be described. Mr. Pitcairn, a resident of Hobart Town, raised an indignant protest, in which he urges that "all that the free colonists suffer, even the total destruction of Van Diemen's Land as a free colony, is as nothing to what the wretched convicts are forced to submit to. It is not bodily suffering that I refer to: it is the pollution of their minds and hearts which is forced upon them and which they cannot escape from. Loathsome as are the details of their miserable state, it is impossible to see thousands of men debased and depraved without at least making an attempt to save others from the same fate." The congregation of criminals in large numbers without due supervision, meant simply wholesale, wide-spread pollution. Assignment, with all its faults, had at least the merit of dispersing the evil over a wide area.