Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/314

 after the precept had been made out actually signed by me in conformity to a promise made before your arrival in this Colony. &hellip;

"With all due deference to your acquirements and the superior faculties of your mind, I consider myself at least your equal in the consideration of a subject new to you, but familiar to me in my daily and hourly duties for now nearly ten years, and I cannot let this opportunity pass without dwelling a little longer on the subject which has given rise to this communication. The most virtuous and best disposed of the free people of this Colony agree with me in the adoption of this principle. The malcontents who since Governor Phillip's time to the present moment have ever been the burden and turmoil of this Colony have free access to you." The blandishments of these people, he continued, usually brought newcomers to their way of thinking, a matter of little importance when the strangers were birds of passage. "But you and I, who have voluntarily undertaken a duty which combines us equally with all, must, in the just fulfilment of those duties, lay aside our own personal feelings—for if we are so delicate in our moral sentiments as to be unapproachable by the general mass of the population of this Colony, or so refined in our senses as to be unable to bear the approach of a naked and generally filthy native, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to form a just estimate of the wants and claims which all alike have upon us.

"The class of persons here who must ever be considered as the first &hellip; have overturned the Government of this Colony—they have occasioned the retirement of every Governor who had held the Government, they are factious, discontented and turbulent. &hellip; Let not the disposition with which nature seems to have endowed you for doing good," he concluded with a sudden flight into rhetoric, "be overwhelmed by an overstrained delicacy, or too refined a sense of moral feelings, for such I consider the preference given to a bad man who perhaps narrowly escaped the stigma of having once been a convict—to one who is now good—but who has been proved not to have been always so. Avert the blow you appear to be too much inclined to inflict on these unhappy beings (if you make them so!), and let the souls now in being, as well as millions yet