Suddenly the successful revolt of the American Colonies closed them as a receptacle for the criminal sewages of Great Britain. Another outlet must be found, and for a time convicts sentenced or liable to transportation were kept at hard labour in the hulks in harbours and arsenals at home. Then Captain Cook found Botany Bay in the antipodes, and for a long time after their inauguration public opinion ran high in favour of penal establishments beyond the seas. "There was general confidence," says Merivale, "in the favourite theory that the best mode of punishing offenders was that which removed them from the scene of offence and temptation, cut them off by a great gulf of space from all their former connections, and gave them the opportunity of redeeming past crimes by becoming useful members of society." Through whatever mire and discomfort it may have waded, beyond doubt Australia has risen to a rank and importance which entitles it to remember unabashed the origin from which the colony sprang. It has long since outgrown the taint of its original impurity. Another writer asserts that "on the whole, as a real system of punishment it (transportation) has failed; as a real system of reform it has failed, as perhaps would every other plan, but as a means of making men outwardly honest, of converting vagabonds most useless in one country, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country, a grand centre of civilisation, it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history." All this is of course indubitable. But in the process of manufacture, Great Britain in fifty years expended eight millions of hard cash, and remained as full of criminals as ever.