John Dunmore Lang

“ Free emigrant British subjects, who might eventually settle in such a colony, would do so as merchants and capitalists, and not as cultivators of the soil on their own account, or by their own labour. ”

“ Besides, as hardships of various kinds, difficulties of unexpected magnitude, and disease in unlooked-for aspects, are almost uniformly experienced in the formation of new settlements, even in situations that are afterwards found remarkably salubrious, as was eminently the case even in New South Wales; it is surely fitting and reasonable, that these hardships, difficulties, and diseases should be encountered and surmounted by transported felons, rather than by a free emigrant population. ”

“ In the formation of such a settlement, several thousand convicts could be employed advantageously for a series of years—in the erection of public buildings, whether of immediate necessity or of permanent utility; in the clearing of land for gardens and for agricultural purposes suited to the soil and climate; in the formation of roads, tanks, piers, bridges, &:c. The supplying of a settlement of this kind with the necessaries of life, by means of convict labour employed in the cultivation of land within the settlement itself, should not, I conceive, be attempted. ”