reform, which gave some ground for the charge of exiling these people to a far-off country, and leaving them to starve. It was too much to expect from Phillip that he could turn a few hundred idle rascals, landed in a desert, into a self-supporting community in less than half a dozen years.
Some particulars of Phillip's methods of punishing the idle and vicious, and of rewarding the industrious, will best answer the charges against his administration, and this chapter of his work, notwithstanding its hanging and flogging details, provides, in its account of the state of society at Sydney Cove, some lighter touches of comedy to relieve the gloom.
Whether it is or ever was right to hang and flog men, although there are still plenty of people who believe in such punishments, is no concern of these writers—but (and this is the point to be remembered) neither was it any concern of Governor Phillip's.
There was law in the land then as now, and Phillip's sole duty was to administer it as he found it. Courts of justice tried prisoners and sentenced them in Sydney in 1788 to punishments which a hundred years ago were generally less severe than judges were at every session passing at the Old Bailey, for in the year of the colony's foundation about 160 crimes were punishable by the death penalty, women were whipped through London streets at the cart-tail, and 500 lashes was a not
