as well as other sentences, bestow grants of land, and create a monopoly of any article of necessity. All the labour in the colony was at his disposal; all the land, all the stores, all the places of honour and profit; and virtually all the justice, as the case of Governor Bligh afterwards proved. The governor's subjects consisted of his subordinates, officers—for, as captain-general, the commandant of the troops was under his orders—of the few who resorted to New South Wales to trade (whose profits were at his disposal), and the convicts—outcasts without civil rights. The distance from England, the few means of communication, the indifference of the English public to the fate of the inhabitants of a penal or any other colony, rendered the governor, so far as the control of law extended, actually irresponsible. As there was no law, so there was no publicity and no public opinion to restrain the exercise of the despotism which was the only possible government in such a penal settlement.
The chief officers were naval and military, of the old school; not the school of Cook and Keppel, Nelson and Collingwood, Wolfe and Cornwallis, but of that school which, by its tyranny, its abuse of power, its neglect of common honesty, of common decency, and common humanity in the treatment, the wages, the clothing, and the food of sailors, created the alarming mutinies of Portsmouth and the Nore.[1]
The powers vested in the governor were exercised without the restraining influence of council or law adviser until 1822.[2]
Amazement and horror overcome us when we look back on the early days of New South Wales. Under the absolute government described, the settlers were crowded together on a narrow space a promontory cleared of a dense forest. The soil was a barren sand; every yard required for cultivation had to be gained by removing enormous trees of a hardness that tried the temper of the best axes, wielded in skilled hands. On one side was an unknown shore and a shipless sea; on the other, an apparently limitless country, inhabited by savages, in which not a step could be taken without danger of being totally lost; a country which produced no wild fruit or root fit for the sustenance of man; and, with the exception of a wandering kangaroo, or a shy, swift emu, no game of any size fit for food.
The want of enterprise which marked the early career of the colonists, and left them so long in ignorance of the rich districts on which, after a long interval, the colony became self-supporting, cannot but be attributed to the form of government and to the moral blight
