As the establishment of the legislative assembly in question could not, however, be well effected before the end of the year 1819, it may not be altogether irrelevant to ascertain what will be the probable amount of the free population at that period. The number of births in the colony cannot at present be computed under two thousand annually, since the increase in these various settlements between the month of November, 1816, and the month of November, 1817, is found to have been three thousand two hundred and eighty-nine souls; and the number of convicts transported thither from the first of January, 1816, to the first of January, 1818, was only three thousand one hundred and eight. Allowing, therefore, that one half of these, or one thousand five hundred and fifty-four, were transported to the colony during the year 1817, the increase that took place there, from birth and emigration will have been one thousand seven hundred and thirty-five: to which if we add five hundred, the number of persons that probably quit the colony annually; the actual rate of increase in the free population in the course of the year 1817, may be fixed at two thousand two hundred and thirty-five souls. Of these the surplus above two thousand, is perhaps composed of emigrants, and the remainder of births. If we add to these one thousand more, who it may be safely calculated yearly become free, by pardon or expiration of servitude, we have an annual augmentation to the free population of three thousand two hundred and thirty-five souls: so that if we take the year 1817, as a standard of computation, and it is evidently a low one, the free population will amount by the end of the year 1819, to at least eighteen thousand four hundred and forty-three souls. This is an elective body much more extensive than is to be found in several of our West India islands, where houses of assembly have been long established. But as this free population is of a mixed description, and composed as well of persons who have been convicts, and have become free either by the expiration of their respective sentences, or by pardon, as of those who have been born in the colony, or have emigrated to it, and have never suffered the penalties of the law, a very delicate question here arises as to the propriety of extending to the first of these classes the privilege of being admitted into the legislative body. There is, I am aware, a party in the colony, by whom the very notion of granting such a privilege to a class of men who have been subject to the lash of the law, would be treated as a chimera pregnant with the most fatal consequences to this infant community. In this, as in most other societies, there is an aristocratic body, which would monopolize all situations of power, dignity and emolument, and put themselves in a posture to domineer alike over the governor and the people. If you consult one of this faction (they deserve no milder appellation) he will tell you that it is dangerous to vest any authority beyond the narrow circle of his own immediate friends. Until the administration of General Macquarie, this body considered themselves possessed of an equal right to the governor's confidence, as if they stood in the same relation to him which the nobility of this country bear to the king, and were _de jure_ his hereditary counsellors. Before his government the great body of the people. I mean such as had become free, scarcely possessed any privilege but that of suing and being sued in the courts of civil jurisdiction. The whole power, and nearly the whole property and commerce of the colony, were in the hands of this faction, who with a very few exceptions were composed of the civil and military, and of persons who had belonged to these bodies formerly. And even in those few solitary instances which could be adduced, of persons originally convicts, who were _allowed_ to acquire an independence, their prosperity was to be traced to the patronage and protection afforded them by some member of the aristocratic junta, to whom they either acted as agents in the disposal of their merchandize (for it was considered by these gentlemen derogatory to their dignity to keep shop and sell openly) or resorted for the purchase of goods on their own accounts. At the prosperity, however, and importance of this faction, the present governor has levelled many a deadly blow within these last nine years; but more particularly in prohibiting the military to hold lands, or to be concerned in traffic, in raising to situations of the highest trust and dignity many deserving persons who had been convicts, and in throwing open the ports of the colony to an unlimited importation of all sorts of merchandize.