Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/264

 to pay a demand absolutely illegal, or to submit to a burthen from which your Excellency has relieved yourself and the Lieutenant-Governor and your respective families and suites. As I must," he concluded, "always feel great reluctance to disturb any arrangements of your Excellency, or to impede in any manner the execution of any measures adopted previous to my arrival at this Colony, I thought it proper before my determination became public to apprise your Excellency, in order that an opportunity might be afforded of removing the necessity that leads to it."

Macquarie made one of those answers in the third person which are the usual refuge of persecuted dignitaries. Without easing the situation, it inflated him with a sense of virtuous indignation and stifled any question of right and wrong. Insolent and turbulent though Bent was, he knew the ways of the law. In such matters Macquarie was at sea without chart or pilot, and he was more than a little uneasy under the judge's onslaught.

And so he took a bold line and wrote: "The Governor has received a most insolent and disrespectful letter of this day's date from Mr. Justice Bent, full of gross misrepresentations and calumnies, which merits no other answer than his expression of contempt for the weak and ineffectual efforts of the writer to disturb the peace of the Colony and to counteract the measures of his administration".

Bent easily refuted the charges of "misrepresentation and calumny." Having once more gone over the ground covered by his previous letter, he proceeded:—

"I may again say that such a system is contrary to that established in England by numerous Acts of Parliament in cases of turnpike roads; and that it is (to me at least) both new and arbitrary. I feel justified in the inference I drew from these facts that there is no person in England, hearing that a trustee of the roads had been appointed, but would conclude that he had the same powers and was subject to the same responsibilities as similar trustees at home, and no one could conceive that such person was a mere non-efficient, or that