studying the details of that vast system of colonisation which is being developed at once upon a great continent, upon innumerable islands, and upon the wide ocean. His work in that respect should be of the greatest interest for the philosopher and the statesman. Never, perhaps, did a subject more interesting and more curious offer itself to the meditation of either, than the colony of Botany Bay, so long misunderstood in Europe."* (* The colony was not at Botany Bay, though the mistake was common enough even in England. But the champion error on that subject was that of Dumas, who, in Les Trois Mousquetaires, chapter 52--the period, as "every schoolboy knows," of Cardinal Richelieu--represents Milady as reflecting bitterly on her fate, and fearing that D'Artagnan would transport her "to some loathsome Botany Bay," a century and a quarter before Captain Cook discovered it! Dumas, however, was a law unto himself in such matters.) Never, perhaps, was there a more shining example of the powerful influence of laws and institutions upon the character of individuals and peoples. To transform the most redoubtable highwaymen, the most abandoned thieves of England, into honest and peaceable citizens; to make laborious husbandmen of them; to effect the same revolution in the characters of the vilest women; to force them, by infallible methods, to become honest wives and excellent mothers of families; to take the young and preserve them, by the most assiduous care, from the contagion of their reprobate parents, and so to prepare a generation more virtuous than that which it succeeds: such is the touching spectacle that these new English colonies present."