holm, who found a great number of the settlers in the Hawkesbury voting for members of council on their original grants. That under the horrid single-man system many should have flown to rum for consolation, is not extraordinary. The old saw says—
"Without a wife,
"A farmer's is a dreary life."
Very little could be expected from a population of which not one in five could obtain an honest helpmate, and which knew little of clergymen except as sellers of rum and dispensers of lashes. Even in the mother country, the duty of educating the masses had hardly begun to make way; thus it was only the inoculation of whatever good there was in the colony, and the facility of getting an honest living, that prevented the colonists of Macquarie's time from becoming a nation of bucaneers.
The ignorant and the vicious were turned loose in New South Wales with the lash and the gallows for those who were found out, but with independence for those who were industrious. The result showed how human nature can run clear where not pressed down by poverty or compressed in towns.
The Rum Hospital was a specimen of the tone of morality during the early years of New South Wales. It was built by three gentlemen, under a contract with the governor, which gave them a monopoly of the sale and importation of rum for a certain number of years. The workmen were, as much as possible, paid in rum, and public-houses were multiplied to an extent exceeding the proportion in the lowest and poorest haunts of Great Britain.
Many individuals, profiting by the enormous government expenditure, became wealthy; and all the sober, and many who were not sober, of the free or freed population were prosperous. It became manifestly better policy to live by work or trade than by robbery.
Of churches there were two, and these barely filled; of the few clergymen the majority were occupied as magistrates, in awarding lashes to refractory servants, in farming, in breeding stock, and dealing in anything that would bring a profit. When New South Wales was considered worthy of an archdeacon, one honourable exception, the much-loved Parson Cowper,[1] was passed over and neglected, according to the rule of the duy, in favour of an ex-wine-merchant.
The Roman Catholics, amounting to some thousands, were not
