"They require deep consideration," replied Dudley. "It is the actual state of things which first strikes us; the remedies may be long in seeking. This is more especially the case when a particular system has long been going on, and every attempt at partial reform has but added evil to evil, till at length the whole has become intolerable. The natural process is easily described; and it is only by historically viewing the question that we can see how such monstrous abominations have arisen. These things are not done as a whole: it is step by step that they are performed. If man sat down calmly to consider what was best to be done under particular circumstances, if he meditated philosophically upon the object which he proposed to attain, and endeavoured to foresee, as far as the shortness of the human view will permit, the results of all that he attempts for temporary purposes, he might frame, and would frame, if not a perfect system, at least one, the defects in which would be comparatively few, and easily remedied; but what has been usually his course? He has considered the temporary purpose alone, and that not philosophically. In the first institution of transportation, his object seemed to be twofold: to punish guilty persons, and to deliver their country from their presence. Simple exile was the simplest form in which this could be achieved; the next was the selling of the convict for a slave; then came the transportation to a colony of the mother country, with a prohibition against return: otherwise the peopling of a colony with the vicious and the criminal; then punishment in the colony was added to mere transportation; and in all and every one of these steps, nothing was held in view but infliction on the culprit--relief to his native land. Reformation was never thought of, degradation was never guarded against; the moral condition of the convict, or his religious improvement, was never taken into consideration; nor did the mind of man seem to reach, till within the last few years, the comprehension of that essential point in the whole question, that where the convict was going he was to become the member of a vast community, the state and condition of which would for years be strictly connected with that of the country which expelled him. None of these things were ever thought of, and still less the high and imperative duty which binds legislators to attempt, in punishing, to reclaim; a duty not only to their country and to their fellow men, but to their God."