Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The first three classes — convicts, redemptioners, and free willers—were of European, at first generally of English, birth. The colonization of the new world gave opportunity for the transportation and subsequent employment in the colonies of large numbers of persons who, as a rule, belonged to a low class in the social scale.1 The mother country looked with satisfaction on this method of disposing of those " such, as had there been no Englith foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for their Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or dyed untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from want, and vice."3 She regarded her "plantations abroad as a good effect proceeding from many evil causes," and congratulated herself on being freed from "such sort of people, as their crimes and debaucheries would quickly destroy at home, or whom their wants would confine in prisons or force to beg, and so render them useless, and consequently a burthen to the public." From the very first the advantage to England of this method of disposing of her undesirable population had been urged. The author of Nova Britannia wrote in 1609: " Ton see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State, to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home,pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse than the plague it selfe."1 So admirable did the plan seem in time that between the years 1661 and 1668 various proposals were made to the King and Council to constitute an office for transporting to the Plantations all vagrants, rogues, and idle persons that could give no account of themselves, felons who had the benefit of clergy, and such as were convicted of petty larceny — such perso...