in the mean time supplying the means of their general demoralization with a liberality and profuseness above all praise. For until so late a period as the 18th of August, 1816, when the demoralizing practice was discontinued by order of Earl Bathurst, ardent spirits were held by the colonial government as the circulating medium or current coin of the colony; they were given in payment for work of every description performed for Government, and issued out in certain fixed quantities to civil and military officers, overseers, clerks, and constables, by way of remuneration, as it was termed, for imaginary services. And so effectual had this preposterous system proved in defeating the great ends of the establishment of the colony, in the course of the first twenty years after its original settlement, that shortly after the commencement of the present century, the colony had become one grand scene of brutal dissipation and licentiousness, of lawless violence and rapine. The following is the testimony of a competent and unprejudiced witness, who arrived in the colony about the year 1802, as to the scenes that were then generally exhibited in New South Wales among the emancipated convict settlers and their convict servants:—
Eighteen years ago, the period when I arrived in this colony, it was lamentable to behold the
