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TRANSPORTATION

up each of these pits with the stuff that had come out of the other!—And this in a country where roads and bridges are required in every direction, and where the agricultural emigrant is often obliged to cut down an acre of standing timber as hard as mahogany, ere he can grow an acre of corn! In short, if the Land Companies of the British North American provinces can derive large profits from the greatly increased value of particular tracts of land, by constructing roads and bridges along their whole extent, and laying off eligible sites for towns and villages, before selling them in lots at several years' credit to emigrants of the humbler classes from the mother country,—why should the British government, which has the absolute command of so much convict labour in New South Wales, not do something of the same kind in that colony, now that the revenue derivable from the sale of its waste land can enable either the government or private individuals to convey whole shoals of the very same class of emigrants, free of all cost to themselves, to the shores of New Holland? A process of this kind would render the transportation system really subservient to colonization, while it would speedily establish along the coasts of Australia an industrious and virtuous population; whose characters and example would prove conducive in