On one point all appear to be agreed: that the old assignment system, and _à fortiori_ any Norfolk Island system, which tends to mass convicts together in bodies undiluted by the elements of ordinary society, can never more be tolerated. Those who view the subject with a practical knowledge, and yet without local predilections, believe that transportation cannot be continued much longer, even to Western Australia. I am well aware that the Irish as well as the English authorities desire that that outlet should be retained, and I see objections to any _sudden_ closing of it; but that it ought to be abolished within a comparatively few years I am convinced. I have the very highest authority for the avowal, that the crime, which irresistibly impelled Sir William Molesworth’s Committee to pronounce the doom of convictism in Australia generally, cannot be prevented or effectively controlled in Western Australia, even now. One of the most experienced officials, Mr. Thomas Frederick Elliot, of the Colonial Office, was amongst those who stood against the abolition proceedings of 1837; but “further observation,” he says, “has altered my opinion.” The convicts who remained in Sydney and New South Wales have done harm. Western Australia may profit from the expedient while the colony is in a languishing state, but it can never be a substitute for ordinary colonization. The relief is not “beneficial to this country”—“the numbers sent out are too trifling to be of any account,” either to the mother country or to the colony. “In every point of view I think that transportation as a system has come to an end, and that its day is past.”