contains no such persons as "Government women" though the question was once mooted by some of the settlers as to whether a small number of female convicts should not be admitted. The proposal, however, met with so much disapprobation in the colony that it was at once withdrawn, and the opposite course was adopted of begging the Emigration Commissioners to send out respectable women unacquainted with the interior of jail or penitentiary, who might act as domestic servants, and reclaim the convicts by becoming their wives.
The authorities might have answered, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," but call as they would, respectable single women, however poor they might be, entirely declined to come out to Swan River to become the wives of even "reformed" criminals, and it has been found impossible to obtain a sufficient number of young women, even of such a class as the greater part of our fellow-passengers on board ship, to supply wives to one-half of the single convicts now at liberty. Hence arises the deplorable inequality between the numbers of the single men and single women shown by the census of 1870; an inequality however, which seems likely to have one good result, since from the comparatively small number of convicts who have been able to marry and bring up families, and the rapid diminution of the older men by death, it seems probable that the convict element of the colony will not make so large a mark upon the future population as might naturally be expected, but will gradually die out, now that the yearly supply is stopped.
Few as the emigrant girls were we often wished that their numbers had been even less, so many were the
