Mr. M'Lachlan, in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, put the case of Van Diemen's Land in a striking aspect. "Shall the fairest isle in the south be converted into one huge gaol? shall the free inhabitants be made the passive instruments of punishing these criminals? Is this the only capacity in which the British government will recognise the free colonists? The petitioners have laid their case before the legislature. They trust they have not appealed in vain--that they will not be driven from a land where the best days of many of them have been spent" (February, 1846). The petition prepared by Mr. Pitcairn was presented in the lords by the Marquis of Lansdowne (March, 1846). In remarking on its contents, Lord Stanley begged their lordships to believe that the question involved interests more important than a single colony! He stated that Van Diemen's Land could not be swamped by an annual influx of four thousand. If, he said, the thirty thousand persons released from the prisons of France were so intolerable, what must be the condition of England with sixty thousand expirees then settled in the colonies? Van Diemen's Land was always a penal colony, and he saw no reason that it should be otherwise. Earl Grey warmly censured this policy, and complained "that no hope of relief from the frightful evils of transportation had been afforded." He stated that he was "prepared to express an opinion that transportation should be got rid of. He had long entertained that opinion, and had never seen the arguments of the Archbishop of Dublin refuted." A duplicate of this petition, presented to the Commons, was followed by the motion of Mr. Ewart, "That it is inexpedient to make Van Diemen's Land the sole receptacle of convicts, and that transportation be abolished, except as a supplement to penal discipline" (May, 1846). The day chosen was inauspicious. The "house" was gone to the Epsom races. Mr. Hudson, the railway king, not better employed, stumbled into the chapel of St. Stephen, and counted out the members. Mr. Ewart renewed his motion (July 6). A few days before Earl Grey and Mr. Hawes had obtained the command of the colonies, they admitted the facts of the petition, and promised redress. The liberal principles avowed by the new government reassured the friends of Van Diemen's Land. Mr. Gladstone had determined to arrest the influx of convicts for two years: this was approved by his successor. In quashing the North Australian colony, Earl Grey stated his dissent from the principles on which it had been founded (September 30, 1846). The whigs ever expressed a decided abhorrence of penal colonisation and the collection of masses cradled in the traditions of crime. When taunted with this accumulation in Van Diemen's Land as the result of his policy of 1840, Lord John Russell explained:--"As to the sending of convicts to Van Diemen's Land, he had intended to adopt the policy recommended in the work of the Archbishop of Dublin.