Exiles.

The publication of Earl Grey's dispatch respecting the introduction of convicts into this colony in the still more objectionable form of “Exiles,” has justly excited the greatest alarm in the minds of all classes of the community, both in this and the sister settlements. Parents tremble for the future welfare of their children, merchants for the safety of their stores, and Christians and Christian missionaries of all denominations regard the proposed measure as fraught with the most disastrous consequences to the spiritual welfare of both the European and the Maori. Perhaps there is no country into which the introduc-page 260tion of these ticket-of-leave men would be such an unmitigated evil. The Natives scattered through the interior, and the numerous whaling parties on the coast, offer the greatest possible facilities for the idle and ill-disposed to locate themselves, and from these places as from centres, a moral contagion would spread like a pestilence, acting and re-acting with fearful force upon the present, and all future generations. Most fervently do we pray that the Sovereign Disposer of all events may avert the threatened evil, and we earnestly press upon all our fellow colonists, that they should, by the urgency of their protests against the measure, at least exonerate themselves from its guilt.