given from the King's store for self and servants for the first six months, and a loan of cattle from the government herds. The newcomers therefore were mostly gentlemen farmers, younger sons of land-owners, or commercial men who had saved something from a general crash in business. Most of these people were sufficiently alive to their own advantage to realise the opportunity now held out to them. Land for nothing, food and stock till the first difficulties of settlement were overcome—these were baits that many were ready enough to swallow. Labour was also gratuitously provided by the same kind hands that gave the land.

For some years this more than parental encouragement continued, till at length the influx of settlers came to be thoroughly felt. The labour that was so lately a drug, was now so eagerly sought that the demand grew greater than the supply. The governor was unable to comply with all the requisitions for servants made by the land grantees. This at once brought about the abandonment of the agricultural penal settlements established by General Macquarie. Their success had always been doubtful: although land to a considerable extent had been cleared, timber felled, buildings erected, and farming attempted, no great results had ever been obtained. Indeed now when the land which had thus been occupied was again resumed, it was found to have been little benefited. One by one they were broken up. They were costly and unproductive. On the other hand, the settlers, old and newly arrived, were clamorous for the hands thus wastefully employed. "So steadily," says Laing, "did the demand for convict labour increase on the part of the free settlers that, during the government of Lieutenant-General Darling, there were at one time applications for no fewer than 2,000 labourers lying unsatisfied in the office of the principal superintendent of convicts."