entrusted with more than
magisterial power.

While the female prisoners were landed, his clerks became brokers
for masters, friends, and husbands. When ships arrived, boats
crowded round them, and the visitors chose, among the female prisoners,
a wife, or such other relative as might answer to their prior
engagements.[123] Having _sworn_ to these ties of kin, the
superintendent assigned them according to the plan of the contracting
parties, who, within twenty-four hours, had been total strangers. We may
imagine the _eclat_ with which so clever a device would be appeared to
the correspondents of the fortunate transport.

Those, whose appearance or dullness excluded them from these resources,
were taken to the factory. On their arrival, "according to custom," they
were met by a body of men, who, having satisfied the constables, spread
before these women the spirits and provisions provided for the feast of
welcome: what followed need not be told. The connivance of the
superintendent, with the most of these excesses, might be expected from
his character; and although he displayed considerable tact in subjecting
the prisoners to his control, his appointment and prerogatives almost
justified, and they fully accounted for, the rancour with which his
patron was opposed and condemned.

Thus Macquarie did not exercise the caution requisite to preserve his
generous designs from parliamentary censure: imprudent efforts to give
effect to his conviction, involved him in a contest which hastened his
recall, and it is said, shortened his life.[124] He raised to the bench,
and invited to his table, several emancipists of wealth, and made their
social reception the condition of his favor. When elevating to offices,
he sometimes violated his own rule of forgetting the past, by basing his
eulogy on the reformation of the person he delighted to honor. The
details of their character, furnished by the indignant or malicious,
cast an air of ridicule on their public reception. The subalterns of the
army refused to join their superior officers in entertainments, at which
emancipists were guests. The resentment of Macquarie aggravated the
quarrel, until the differences divided the colony into factions, and
finally originated the emancipist party; and by provoking observation,
tended to increase the severity which fell on their successors.

In those times of despotism, many were transported for political
offences, which in Great Britain leave