e improvement of the little colony was evidently steady and
increasing, when its affairs are regarded in a temporal point of view,
in morals its progress appeared to be directly contrary; and, painful
though it be to dwell upon the sins and follies of men, whose bodies
have long since passed away to their parent dust, and their souls
returned to God who gave them, nevertheless, there are many wholesome
lessons of instruction and humiliation to be gathered from the history
of human depravity in New South Wales. One of the crying sins of the
mother country,--a sin now very much confined to the lower classes of
society, but fifty years ago equally common among all classes,--is that
of _drunkenness_; and it could scarcely be expected that the outcast
daughter in Australia would be less blamable in this respect than the
mother from which she sprang.[102] Accordingly, we find that as soon as
it was possible to procure spirits, at however great a sacrifice, they
were obtained, and intoxication was indulged in,--if such brutality
deserves the name of indulgence,--to an awful extent. Whether all that a
writer very intimately acquainted with New South Wales urges against the
officers of the New South Wales Corps be true or not, so far as their
dealings in spirituous liquors are concerned, there can be no question
that these mischievous articles became almost entirely the current coin
of the settlement, and were the source of worldly gain to a few, while
they proved the moral ruin of almost all, in the colony. But, without
giving entire credit to all the assertions of Dr. Lang, who deals very
much in hasty notions and exaggerated opinions,[103] we may sorrowfully
acknowledge that, if the convicts in New South Wales gave way in a
horrible manner to drunkenness and its attendant sins, the upper
classes, in general, either set them a bad example, or made a plunder of
them by pandering to their favourite vice. The passion for liquor, it is
stated by Collins,[104] operated like a mania, there being nothing which
the people would not risk to obtain it: and while spirits were to be
had, those who did any extra labour refused to be paid in money, or in
any other article than spirits, which were then so scarce as to be sold
at six shillings a bottle. So eagerly were fermented liquors sought
after, and so little was the value of money in a place where neither the
comforts nor luxuries of life could be bought, that the purchaser has
been often