John Dunmore Lang

“ The practice of transportation to the American colonies, which was thus irregularly introduced into Great Britain, continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the commencement of the war of American independence. At first, if we may credit the testimony of a contemporary historian, "the convicts who were thus transported were very acceptable to the colonists," to whom they were generally indented for a certain period, at a certain fixed rate per head, by ship-masters, who carried them over from England on speculation ”

“ Accordingly, as soon as the "calculating" colonists of the American plantations found that kidnapped negroes from the coast of Africa, whom they had bought with their money at a comparatively low price, and reduced to hopeless and hereditary slavery, with the sanction and encouragement of the British parliament, were healthier and more robust, besides being more easily controlled, and altogether a better bargain than criminals from England, they began gradually to testify their reluctance to have any additional consignments of convicts thrown into their respective territories ”

“ On such occasions, whether it was the aristocratic or the democratic party that had gained the upper hand in the petty commonwealths of Athens, of Corinth, or of Thebes, large bodies of obnoxious citizens were obliged, from motives of prudence as well as from sheer necessity, to submit simultaneously to voluntary exile, and to search for a home and a country on the coasts of Asia Minor or in the Ionian Islands, in Italy, and the island of Sicily, or even on the remote coast of France. ”