Note 170 — Chapter XI

A glance over the two ponderous volumes of the evidence before the Transportation Committee in 1837 and 1838 will satisfy every unprejudiced person that our penal colonies are not yet ripe for a representative government. It is curious enough to compare the fearful picture of these settlements drawn by one section of the so-called Liberal party, which wages war against transportation, with the more pleasing and flattering description of their social condition which is given by that other section of the same party which claims for the colonists “constitutional rights.”