Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/156

 made very bad and quarrelsome servants, and complaints were universal.

The male convicts were assigned to settlers or kept to work for the Government. At the end of 1819 there were in Government service altogether 2,476 male convicts, and 200 were serving colonial sentences at Newcastle. The remaining 6,388 prisoners were in the service of the inhabitants of the Colony both free and freed. Their masters were not all employed in agricultural pursuits. In Sydney, for example, and the district surrounding it, there were 2,368 assigned servants, most of the masters of whom were occupied in the town. Great landowners, such as Macarthur and William Cox, had as many as a hundred convicts, and Wentworth and an emancipist named Terry, who owned the two largest estates in the Colony, probably had still more. Settlers with farms of five to fifty acres usually received one servant with their grant, and were allowed to retain him at their own expense if they wished. This was something of an innovation, for before 1811 a convict servant was not allowed to any one farming less than twenty acres. For reasons which will appear later it was an innovation which received little approval from the magistrates.

While the convicts were being thus distributed over wider and wider areas their distribution was in another way restricted. It had for long been customary to allow to each of the civil officers of the Government and of the officers of the garrison a domestic servant subsisted at Government expense. Lord Bathurst learnt of this practice for the first time from one of Macquarie's despatches, and immediately directed him to bring it to an end. This was done by a Government Order in 1814, and at the same time it was announced that Government would no longer give rations to the families of officers on the civil staff. It was thought necessary, however, to exempt from this rule the subordinate officers, the superintendents, overseers, clerks and