THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE. 7 



garrison accounted for 1,416 and the civil staff for 30. Many 

 of the women were the wives of the soldiers and men on the 

 civil staff. Certainly not more than 900 men and 300 women 

 belonged to the class of free settlers. Some of these, it is 

 impossible to say how many, were the first of the Australian- 

 born, the offspring of the earliest settlers and convicts, then just 

 reaching the borders of adult life. 1 There cannot under any 

 circumstances have been in 1 8 10 more than 600 or 700 voluntary 

 adventurers. 2 



It was only natural that, at a time when in all countries the 

 boundaries of class were well-marked, the ranks of a population 

 so strangely recruited as that of New South Wales should be 

 crossed and recrossed by lines of social distinctions. The 

 broadest division was that between convict and free, which 

 marked a man from the moment at which he first set foot in 

 the territory. No matter what position he afterwards attained, 

 whether he rose from prisoner to landed proprietor or fell from 

 freedom to the ranks of the colonial gaol-gang, the important 

 thing was not what he had come to be but how he had come 

 to be there. 3 Among the convicts themselves new divisions 

 came into existence the chief of them that between the men 

 who were and the men who were no longer prisoners. From 

 the vocabulary of slavery this class gained its name, and a body 

 of freed but not freemen was formed within the convict ranks. 

 The distinction between " freed " and " free " cut deep into the 

 social, economic and judicial structure of the Colony. By 

 completing his sentence or by means of a free pardon or a 

 conditional pardon or " emancipation," which gave him freedom 

 so long as he remained within the colonial boundaries, a prisoner 

 might join the ranks of the freed, but the taint of servitude kept 

 him from the full rights of citizenship. It was, however, only 

 as the Colony began under Macquarie to emerge from infancy, 



1 Probably 300 would be an outside limit. 



2 The estimate of the male convict population is probably too low. This 

 should very possibly be larger and the free element smaller, for in 1820 the free 

 settlers (excluding the Australian-born) were reckoned at as low a figure as 

 794. See Chapter V. 



3 The social, and to some extent the legal, consequences of imprisonment in 

 a colonial gaol differed according to the nature of the crime, and also according 

 to whether the offence was a crime by English or by Governor-made law only. 



