386 THE SLAVE TRADE 1789 through the length and breadth of the land^ working on the farms, the roads, and the public buildings of a joung country, where society has hardly had time to establish itself, is to create the most formidable obstacle to social progress Social blood- that can be conceived. The moral result of such an element poisoning. is concentrated poison of the most virulent kind, certain to make itself felt in a thousand unsuspected places, and some- times to break out in an eruption of atrocious crime. The dullness of vision on these subjects which shows itself so palpably in the statesmanship of the last century, is one of the most conspicuous features in its history. There was not a statesman of that time who expressed any doubt as to the good results likely to flow from the transportation system. All argument on the subject was siunmed up in Popular the dogma that, if the mother country benefited by it in one way, the colony derived an equal advantage in another * In the course of a short discussion in the House of Com- mons on Botany Bay in 1791, Pitt expressed the following sentimentf : — Pitt's Yiew— That it was a necessary and essential point of police to send ^^y to some of the most incorrigible criminals out of the kingdom^ no coronSto.*** ™*^ could entertain a doubt ; since it must be universally ad- mitted that it was the worst policy of a State to keep oflfenders of that description at home to corrupt others and contaminate the less guilty, by communicating their own dangerous depravity. Here we see that, while Pitt's mind was occupied with the fear of innocent people in England being corrupted and contaminated by contact with criminals, it did not occur to him that equally innocent people in the colony might in after years become the victims of similar associa- tions. Nor did the matter meet with any attention from a Select Committee of the House of Commons which, in 1812, recommended that women of the worst class should be sent out to become the mothers of a new race.
- The pioas Portugese excused the capture of African negroes on the
ground that, by making slaves of them, tney saved their soula, becaun: they were converted to Christianity. — Helps, The Spanish Cfmqaest in America, vol. i, p. 31. t Parliamentary History, vol. xxviii, p. 1224. Digitized by Google
