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 had full power to direct the Governor to remove the offenders from the colony, it cannot be urged that he had no alternative but to allow them to be executed. This wide departure from Phillip's rule of justice was a fitting prelude to the almost universal abuse of power which afterwards prevailed on the field and the scaffold. In the first, firearms were pitted against wooden weapons. The victims of the second, whose countrymen could not be called as witnesses in their favour, and if called would have been refused by the prosecutor and judge, have been hanged in the name of justice, with all the solemnity of British law.

Subsequently to the first famine, both Sydney and Norfolk Island were reduced to great privations. In 1791 the suffering was depicted in the ghastly countenances of the population. Again Phillip despatched a vessel, the Atlantic, to procure food in India; but before the arrival of relief the scale of rations was reduced to a minimum.

Mortality prevailed among the convicts. Of 122 who arrived from Ireland in 1791, only fifty were alive in May 1792. Collins tells us: "The wretches who were concerned in committing robberies were in general too weak to receive a punishment adequate to their crimes. Their universal plea was hunger; but it was a plea that, in the situation of the colony, could not be so much attended to as it certainly would have been in a country of greater plenty." The gallantry of Phillip found occasion to show itself during the famine. Persons invited to dine at Government House were informed by the aide-de-camp that they must provide themselves with bread. Phillip with his own hand wrote on the invitations to John Macarthur and his wife—"There will always be a roll for Mrs. Macarthur."

Amongst the standing crops of maize frequent depredations took place; and the despondency of 1790 was paralleled when, in May 1792, the weekly ration was reduced to one pound and a-half of flour and four pounds of maize per man; women, and children ten years of age, receiving one pound less of maize. Sufferers in exposed boats have told us of the wild and significant glances which are shot around when provision has failed, and the idea of self-preservation by cannibalism furtively enters the mind. Dimly a kindred