Note 306 — Chapter IX
Reading edition
Captain Smith says of Virginia, "that the number of felons and vagabonds did bring such evil character on the place, that some did choose to be hanged rather than go there, and were."—Graham's Rise and Progress of the United States, vol. i., p. 71.
"England adopted in the seventeenth century the system of transportation to her North American plantations, and the example was propagated by Cromwell, who introduced the practice of selling his political captives as slaves to the West Indians. But the number of regular convicts was too small, and that of free laborers too large, in the old provinces of North America, to have allowed this infusion of a convict population to produce much effect on the development of those communities, either in respect of their morals or their health.[307] Our own times are the first which have witnessed the phenomena of communities, in which the bulk of the working people consists of felons serving out the period of their punishment."—Merrivale, vol. ii., p. 3.