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 CHAPTER X

CONVICT LABOUR.

URING the six years, between 1831 and 1837, that Sir Richard Bourke had the government of New South Wales, convicts were introduced at the rate of about three thousand a year, while the number of free emigrants for that period, including those introduced at the expense of the land fund, did not exceed fifteen thousand. The proportion of the sexes throughout the colony was about thirty women to every hundred men.

During the government of Brisbane and Darling, able-bodied convicts had ceased to be an expense to the government; they were eagerly sought as mechanics, labourers, and shepherds, and their distribution became an important part of government patronage. A man on good terms with the powers in office might not only farm, build a house, furnish it, manufacture carts and agricultural implements, and carry on any mechanical trade with workmen to whom he had not to pay any wages except such presents as it pleased him to make to stimulate their vigilance. The proprietor of a newspaper, who had criticised some act of Sir Ralph Darling's government, was punished by the recal to government service of the prisoner compositors he employed.

One of the early acts of Sir Richard Bourke was to arrange a set of rules, on which, without favour, and according to priority of application and extent of occupation, employers were to be entitled to the use of prisoner servants.

In 1831, Sir Richard Bourke introduced and passed an act, by which the number of lashes to be inflicted on summary conviction by a single magistrate were limited to fifty* The moral condition of the employing classes in the colony at that period may be imagined from the fact, that for this measure, of justice and mercy, the governor was assailed with a loud cry of pro-flogging indignation, and from that time forward was subjected to a factious opposition and a series of annoyances from the Plutocracy of the colony, which eventually led to his resignation. Foremost among his assailants was a Scotchman, of the name of Mudie, who had had the misfortune to take up his abode in New South Wales a few years too late, instead of proceeding to Louisiana or Cuba, where his little peculiarities might have had full scope, without impertinent interference from governors or newspapers.