378 THE OLD POLICY. 1789 Sydney might well have thought it safer to continue the existing system of transporting convicts to the colonies, than P»jejudice In to risk his own political credit by novel legislation, or by established attempting the establishment of a colony on new principles. The hulks in the Thames, as well as Newgate and the other gaols in the kingdom, were crowded with felons of all kinds who — but for the American war of independence — ^would have been sent off in shiploads to Maryland and Virginia, as of old. All the material necessary to found a colony, as he thought, was ready to his hand, and so the order was given that convicts should in future be sent to New South The old Wales instead of to America. The difference amounted to founding uo moro than pointing the ships' heads across the Pacific, instead of across the Atlantic, Ocean. The exclusion of free settlers from the scheme, in the first instance, was probably due to fear of political complications ; and such men would not for many years have been allowed, still less ' encouraged, to go out to the colony in any number, but for the representations made by Phillip. Nor is this view of the matter altogether to be wondered at, when the history of European colonisation is borne in mind. Up to that period, it had not proved an easy matter to obtain free settlers for the purpose of occupying new countries ; there was a strong prejudice, too, against the emigration of such men ; and governments had consequently been under the Convicts and necessity of employing convict labour and encouraging the slave trade in peopling their colonies, which were then valued solely for what they could contribute to the wealth of the parent State. Convict and slave labour grew uni- versally in demand for working mines, growing sugar, cotton, and tobacco, and otherwise providing raw material for the home markets. Transportation and the slave trade had thus become firmly embedded in the national policy, to such an extent that the American and West Indian colonies might be said to have been built up on those foundations. In this decision of Sydney's may perhaps be found an explanation of the singular negligence which marked his Digitized by Google
