Transportation signally failed as a deterrent, partly because the punishment was carried out so far from home, and partly on account of the unequal manner in which the penal system was administered. In the Crown Colonies, such as Bermuda, the servitude was of the hardest description, but in Australia the custom arose of assigning convicts as servants to colonists. This gave facilities for all kinds of abuses. A glaring and often-quoted instance of the kind of thing that went on may be cited. A certain bank clerk who had robbed his employers was convicted and sentenced to be transported to Australia, but the stolen property was not recovered. The convict was duly conveyed to New South Wales; soon afterwards his wife arrived in the same colony, and having selected her husband as a servant, the two lived together in security and wealth on the proceeds of the robbery. Deterrents must be advertised in order to be effectual; the county gaol by the roadside is an ocular reminder of the reality of punishment, but a vague knowledge that felons were serving their time in the Antipodes was a far less potent preventive: indeed transportation came to be regarded as desirable by many, who gladly submitted to expatriation for the sake of getting a fresh start in life in a new land at the public expense. Escott remarks that whilst Australia was at once a penal settlement and a thriving colony, "the strange spectacle was seen of honest artisans emigrating of their own accord to spots where felons also were relegated for their offences."[170] The second line of defence upon which the country relied for the diminution of crime was an unpaid parochial police, sometimes assisted, and sometimes thwarted, by the various stipendiary establishments already described, and this combination, as we have seen, was almost as untrustworthy as the penal system had proved itself to be. The constables or headboroughs, and the thief-takers, or as we should now call them, detectives, were more vigorous than the watchmen, but in some respects they were also more dangerous to society; the former lived largely by blackmail and the latter on blood-money. The salary of the headborough for Shoreditch was only ninety shillings a year, the post was not one of honour, and the stipend surely too insignificant to be an attraction; yet there was no lack of applicants, who by the diligent gleaning of perquisites and by the industrious collection of blackmail, saw their way to make a good living out of the office. As much as thirty-six shillings a day could be earned by a headborough by appearing in a prosecution at the Old Baily, and bribes from those employed in the liquor traffic were a still more profitable source of income.