The transport with which the condemned malefactor receives the reprieve or the news of pardon, proves the estimation in which he holds life, not more on his own account, than as it concerns his future hopes of benefiting his children or relations. With what rapturous emotion must the robber feel his bosom swell, when informed that his pardon was given because the life of the person he had robbed was spared!—that because in the career of his maddening plunder, whilst with one hand he grasped the purse, and with the other the devoted throat of his unresisting victim, a sudden thought of his own little ones flashed across his brain, and made him cast away the deadly pistol!—Grateful for the extension of life, one cannot but think he will carry with him in his exile a strong tendency to amendment, and impress on the mind of other offenders that sense of humanity which saved and opened to him so great a consolation. The original intention of disposing of convicts by transportation was most likely to break off all existing connexions, and to estrange the mind from all former associations, so as to render the prisoner as abstracted as possible from every consideration but that of the immediate duty or discipline imposed. The expense attending their removal made it necessary that it should be repaid out of the convicts’ labour; and every possible chance of a return before their time, and all thought of home, or as much as could be, were carefully removed, that their whole time should be given for the above purpose. The punishment of exile had other terrors for the convicts themselves, which served to render their banishment a temporary slavery. The ingenious Doctor Colquhoun gives the following on the origin of _Transportation_: “Parliament authorized this species of punishment in 1718, when the general plan of sending convicts to the American plantations was first adopted. This system continued for 56 years, during which period, and until the commencement of the American war in 1775, great numbers of felons were sent chiefly to the province of Maryland. The rigid discipline which the colonial laws authorized the masters to exercise over servants, joined to the prospects which agricultural pursuits, after some experience was acquired, afforded to those _outcasts_, tended to reform the chief part; and after the expiration of their servitude, they mingled in the society of the country, under circumstances highly beneficial to themselves, and even to the colony. Possessed in general (as every adroit thief must be) of good natural abilities, they availed themselves of the habits of industry they acquired in the years of their servitude; became farmers and planters on their own account; and many of them succeeding in those pursuits, not only acquired that degree of respectability which is attached to property and industry, but also in their turn became masters, and purchased the servitude of future transports sent out for sale.”