uncommon punishment for breaches of discipline in the Army and Navy. It is a fact that a woman, for the crime of coining, was strangled and afterwards burnt in public in front of Newgate gaol in the very year that Phillip landed in Sydney, and about a hundred executions was the annual average for England at this time. Of course, twelve 'good men and true' did not in Sydney try their fellow-citizens when they 'got into trouble,' but then the country was at this time a gaol, and the most sanguine philanthropist has scarcely ventured to argue that gaol discipline can be maintained by trial by jury.
It is asserted that Phillip was severe—that granted he had to flog, he flogged unmercifully. Phillip was a naval officer, and in the Navy of those days flogging was almost the only punishment. A century ago such men as Phillip punished with a few lashes, if sailors, would have either been hanged or flogged round the fleet, and the number of strokes with the cat would have been measured by the hundred. A naval officer thus educated in punishing could scarcely be expected to be gentle in his methods, and if he showed in the least degree that he had got the better of such a training, posterity might well deal kindly with his memory.
It is difficult for readers at this end of the century to realise the shocking character of the English prison system, or rather utter absence of system, that pre-
