"By a return for the years 1820 to 1829 inclusive, it appears that, deducting from the gross expense the sums earned by the labour of the convict, the cost of feeding, clothing, and maintaining each individual, together with that of the establishment, and of repairing the hulks, did not, in the course of last year, exceed £3 17_s._ 4-3/4_d._ per man. "The expense of transporting convicts to New South Wales presents a very unfavourable view of that method of treatment, miscalled punishment, as compared with detention and hard labour on board the hulks. The official returns of 1828 give, for the charge of carrying out each male, £26 18_s._ 6_d._; for each female, £34 8_s._ 6-3/4_d._ In 1829, for each male, £25 15_s._ 9-3/4_d._; for each female, £27 12_s._ 6-1/4_d._" At that time Australia, Van Dieman's Land, and the Cape of Good Hope, were so sparsely populated by Europeans, that the introduction of criminal scum could not very well prejudice anything but the criminal colonies themselves. Once there, they were irrevocably fixed until their sentence was expired, and returning before that time was punishable by death, until August, 1834, when an Act of Parliament was passed (5 Gul. IV. c. 67) which reduced the penalty to transportation for life. But if the vicious and criminal were transported, so occasionally were the good and innocent, and one case is specially pregnant; it occurs in a letter in the _Times_ of May 1, 1833-- "Sophia Hallen, a gentlewoman by birth, after having been detained in prison for several years on an execution obtained in an action at law by an attorney for the amount of his bill of costs for £100, was put upon her trial at the Clerkenwell Sessions on Thursday last, and sentenced to seven years transportation beyond the seas, for refusing, in effect, to give up her little property to discharge the debt of this person, who is her only real creditor; who, it is alleged by her, has acted improperly in not following the instructions of his client, in the first instance; in subsequently holding back material documents, and in rendering a false account in not giving credit for money he had received, and which have had the effect in making the defendant, evidently a strong-minded woman, obstinately refuse to do any act whereby the prosecutor may obtain payment of his demand." If we want to know how the system of transportation worked, a glance through the pages of "The Felonry of New South Wales," by Jas. Mudie, Lond., 1837, gives us details hardly to be found elsewhere. Talking about assigning servants, how husbands were assigned to wives, etc., and then became practically free, he says--