the "poor, distressed, old and infirm," and no distinction of bond and free was drawn. The funds were purely voluntary, and the management vested in a General Committee, an "Acting" Committee of seven, both of which met in Sydney, and five District Committees. The subscriptions in 1820 amounted to £434, and many poor settlers were amongst the subscribers. To have laid any compulsory obligation on any district to support its own poor would have been unjust as well as inexpedient, for there was no Law of Settlement, and population moved very freely from one place to another. The system of voluntary subscriptions to a central fund, assisted by local subscriptions which were also voluntary, worked fairly well, and between 1818 and 1820 the Society relieved 201 cases. The Government built a house for the reception of aged people just outside the town of Sydney, and handed it over to the management of the General Committee, and also gave to the Society a piece of land at Richmond, in the Hawkesbury District. Rations from the Government stores were also issued to seventy-seven persons recommended by the magistrates.[1]
An attempt at this time to form an Agricultural Society came to an untimely end. Wylde hoped by means of balloting for the election of members to prevent the necessity of excluding or including ex-convicts by any rule. With a ballot he thought some would have been elected and others, who were personally undesirable, would not. But the Governor refused to be the patron of the Society unless the emancipists were freely admitted; and, lacking his support, the scheme was dropped.
Wylde was probably right in thinking that with the ballot the exclusion would only have been partial, for even Bell, one of the strongest opponents of convict magistrates and of Macquarie's emancipist policy generally, said he "would not confound a man sent out for a political crime with a common felon or man guilty of an immoral offence."[2]
- ↑ See Wylde's Evidence, Appendix, Bigge's Reports. R.O., MS. See Bigge's Report III., and Sydney Gazette for June, 1818. The absence of any compulsory Poor Law organisation making each district self-supporting for purposes of poor relief probably accounts very largely for the slow growth of local Government institutions in Australia. The administration was from the first very much centralised.
- ↑ See Evidence of Wylde and Bell. Appendix, Bigge's Reports. R.O., MS.
