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after such young girls on board ship, and before they are entered in the Group, it is due to them, and in. accordance with the rules of the Society, that every inquiry should be make as to the character of such young girls, so that families may without fear introduce them to their children. The getting up and arrangement of such a meeting as this—the grouping of the families, and creating that intimacy between them which is so necessary, may be easily managed by any benevolent gentleman or lady. Such group-meetings may be formed in different localities, in villages, districts and towns. These Groups, when once thus associated, may keep together when they even get to Australia; they may help each other, and form what I call bush-partnerships.
Indeed, I deem the Group-system almost essential to the success of such a plan as the one suggested; it places a man in a different position with his fellow-men. He enters a sort of an association; it brings him acquainted with a body of his fellow-creatures with whom he was unacquainted before; it raises him in his own estimation, and he feels that if he tried to evade paying the debt contracted as a loan, he might be branded by his late associates, and shunned as a man unworthy the friendship of his late fellow companions. He would feel within himself the conviction that he would be looked upon as a man that, was detaining unjustly the money which justly belonged to the poor and struggling families at home, perhaps some of them his own relatives, to whom this money would be re-lent were, he to pay it as he ought. There is a code of honour, a, sort of manly pride, amongst the industrious and, working classes, that carries more weight with it at times than a court of law. There is nothing a man of this
