Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 2.djvu/321

 IN SPIBITS. 273 In tliese circumstances it was manifestly the duty of the 17M Governor to do all in his power to check the consumption of liquor^ but Grose adopted a coarse which encouraged the practice. The officers desiring to bring into cultivation^ as speedily as possible^ the land which had been granted to them^ employed not only the convicts who had been assigned to them but others who were allowed to work on their own account on certain days. Taking advantage of the fatal passion for liquor, the officers paid these men with spirits, 'Wages wdd and thus had no difficulty in obtaining the extra labour they required.* The consequences may be imagined. Instead of consuming liquor in small quantities, the convicts drank to excess^ and, as the pages of Collins show, work in the fields was too often the prelude to an orgy of intoxication. While the soldiers and petty officials were prohibited from selling liquor to convicts, no matter how small the quantity might be, the commissioned officers were allowed to purchase labour with spirits, which thus became the recomised medium a medium , ofezchuig[6. of exchange between the proprietors of the land and a class of people that it was important in the highest degree to keep from the influence of liquor. The arrangement was a very profitable one for the officers, for they sold the liquor — that is to say, they exchanged it for labour — ^at a much higher rate than that at which they had purchased it. Grose was desirous of giving the officers every possible facility for cultivating their holdings, and although he may have had some misgivings on the subject, he probably thought • ** Not being reetrained from paying for labour with spirits, they [the officers] got a great deal of work done at their several farms (on those days when the conTictsdid not work for the public) by hiring the different gangs/' — Collins, Tol. i, p. 268. " Spirituous liquors was the most general article and mode of payment for such extra labour, and hence in the eyening the whole camp has been nothing else, often, but a scene of intoxication, riots, disturb- ances, &c. Qaming was no less preyalent at the same time [the period of Orose's Gorernorship]. Many of them I have myself detected at this work, both as I have gone to and returned from church. Sixteen were at. one time detected by one of the constables within a hundred yards of the church, and at the time I was preaching. Numbers of them have gamed away the clothes off their backs, and the yerj proyisions served them &om the public stores, for weeks or months before these became due." — ^The Bey. B. Johnson to GoTemor Hunter, 5th July, 1798» VOL. II. — S