Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/164

 servants desired it, in money, but a deduction of £3, might be made for clothing.

The Order issued in 1814 discloses the difficulties of the small settlers with their Government men.

"It having come to the knowledge of the Governor," the Order runs, "that the practice of remunerating Government men for their extra time and labour either by permitting them to employ certain portions of their time for their own benefit, wherever they may choose to engage themselves, or to cultivate grain or rear pigs or other animals in lieu of giving them the wages prescribed by the established regulations of the Colony, his Excellency cannot avoid calling the attention of the public to the consideration of the ill consequences necessarily resulting from either the one commutation or the other. Those persons who have been in the habit of giving up portions of their time to their Government men, must be aware that they thereby enable idle and disorderly persons in the class of assigned convicts to pass into parts of the country where their persons are not known; whilst the latter, availing themselves of that circumstance, commit the most flagrant and atrocious acts under the idea that they will avoid detection.

"That robberies very frequently escape detection by the sudden retreat of the perpetrators from that part of the country where they committed their depredations, is too notorious to be controverted: This fact fully evinces the necessity for doing away the practice.

"Those Government men who have the indulgence of cultivating ground and rearing stock instead of receiving their prescribed wages, frequently become the receivers of stolen grain and provisions, which, being blended with that of their own rearing, baffles detection, and justice is thereby defeated.

"Settlers or others who do not require the entire services of the men assigned to them, or who cannot afford to pay them for their extra labour, are required to return them forthwith to the principal superintendent of convicts at Sydney, or to the magistrates of the district to which they respectively belong."

But the evil against which this Order was directed was the