io A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



wealth were great and his "address" conciliatory. In so small 

 a population the claims of each individual could be tested, and 

 occasionally rigid as was the general rule reason and human- 

 ity triumphed over the levelling of the criminal law, and an 

 ex-convict returned to his previous rank in society. 1 The 

 great test of a man's position and pretensions were the hosts 

 with whom he dined. Save during Bligh's rule, to dine at 

 Government House was a mark of gentility, while to dine at 

 the regimental mess was even more decisive. A great number 

 of the " gentlemen-settlers " were retired army and navy officers 

 who applied with zeal the peculiar caste rules of the services. 

 For the most part they were simple, commonplace men, physic- 

 ally courageous and intellectually vapid, men guided by a 

 strange jumble of uncomprehended motives blind loyalty to 

 the King, their regiment or ship blind acceptance of the 

 Church of England mingled with love of liquor, greed of gain 

 and indifference to the usual tenets of morality. Few were 

 men of striking ability or forceful character, for the colonial 

 garrisons, which formed a back-water of the Service and the 

 retired list, had little to show in those times of war in the way 

 of brains or energy. All that was best was seeking promotion 

 or glory on the field of battle. 



The merchants were on the whole made of better stuff, for 

 their business called for more intelligence and enterprise 

 than the farming and grazing which usually occupied the 

 gentleman-settler.'- 



Ri ley's next division consisted of the traders and settlers 

 who had come to the Colony as free men. This included shop- 

 keepers and tradesmen, and those who in England would have 

 been tenant-farmers, together with schoolmasters and Methodist 

 missionaries. The farmers amongst them were to be found 

 chiefly on the small rich allotments along the banks of the 

 Hawkesbury. Their intercourse with the traders and settlers 



1 Three examples may be given in which men who had been transported 

 associated treely with the gentlemen settlers and Government officials, Ensign 

 Barrallier, who had been transported for killing his opponent in a duel, the Rev. 

 H. C. Fulton, for supposed complicity in the Irish Rebellion, and Sir H. B. 

 Hayes, ex-Sheriff of Cork, for the abduction of a young girl. 



* There were, however, probably few merchants who did not farm some land,, 

 and few settlers who were not interested in some trading project. 



