"Willingly," replied Captain M----, rising from the ground where he had been seated. "I am sorry I have not more powder and shot with me; but I will leave upon the spot where our little party is encamped all that we have, except a few charges, which may be necessary as we go down towards the sea-shore. If you are provident it will serve you for some time; and ere long, depend upon it, a population will grow up around you from whom you will be able to obtain fresh supplies. This country must be destined to be much more thickly populated very soon. The human race is advancing in every direction, and the progress already made is marvellous." "That is the most frightful consideration of all the many which present themselves to the mind in contemplating the present state of the neighbouring colony," replied Dudley. "When one thinks of its rapid progress, and of the multitudes springing up here like a crop of grain, and remembers that almost every seed is diseased, that the moral condition of almost every human being is either tainted at his arrival, or destined soon to be tainted by the contaminating influences to which he is exposed, what can we look forward to in the future but a perfect hell upon earth? Can we expect that, without efficient guidance, with few means of religious instruction, with no moral restraints and no correcting principle but the fear of corporeal punishment, destitute of even habitual reverence for probity, crowded together in places where virtue, and honour, and honesty, are a scoff and a reproach, where the highest distinction is excess in vice or skill in crime, can we expect that any man who may become a father will breed his child up in the way that he should go, and will not rather infect him with his own vices, to be fostered and matured by others, equally, if not more, conversant with crime? It is a known fact, sir, that in the neighbouring colony of Van Dieman's Land the free emigrant of the lower class is looked upon with more doubt and suspicion even than the convict, and is, nine times out of ten, as base and degraded. What must a colony become thus constituted? and what is the awful responsibility upon a nation which, possessing a large, I might say an immense, extent of fertile and beautiful country, plants in it, as the germ of future nations, all that is wretched, abominable, and depraved of the mother country; denies the wretched men that it sends out the means of amelioration, and by every law and ordinance insures that the pestilence shall be propagated from man to man, till none but those who are placed above temptation by superior fortune or superior culture remains unaffected by moral disease more frightful than any plague which ever ravaged the world?" "But how can this be amended?" asked Captain M----. "What are the means?"