“Though Portland is only known to the general public as a place where an outbreak occurred some years ago; and though the discipline has endured the rudest shocks from the changes consequent on the cessation of transportation,—which not only disappointed the expectations that had been held out to the men, but entirely shook their confidence, and was the cause of the outbreak referred to,—the establishment never was in a much higher state of discipline and efficiency than at the present time. The breakwater and fortifications, too, are advancing towards completion, and already constitute a grand and imperishable monument of what can be effected by convict labour. “From 1848 to 1853, during which time alone the established system appears to have been in full operation, everything went on swimmingly. It was ‘all right,’ in the English prisons of Pentonville and Portland; and we have it on the authority of Sir W. Denison, the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, that in 1851 the convicts sent from public works were generally conducting themselves as honestly and industriously as unconvicted farm-servants in England. Every interest was then satisfied. The mother-country annually got rid of some 3,000 of her criminal population, and the colony obtained the advantage of cheap labour. This was the culminating point of a sound and carefully devised system of penal and reformatory discipline. [Sir Joshua Jebb states, in one of his reports, that we never may hope to see the like again. The last ship sailed in 1852; and though he must have cast a lingering look after it, he appears to have manfully set to work to repair the breach made in the system of discipline.]