another, who had gone into the woods, was proclaimed an outlaw. For want of any overseers or police, except those taken from their own class, the convicts were getting beyond all discipline; and so utterly reckless and improvident were some of them, that they would consume their weekly allowance of provisions by the end of the third or fourth day, and trust for their supply during the rest of the week to the chance of being able to steal from others that were more provident.[85] One of these degraded creatures is stated to have made up his week's allowance of flour (eight pounds) into cakes, which having devoured at one meal, he was soon after taken up, speechless and senseless, and died the following day. Among a population like that of which we are treating, while crimes were lamentably common, conviction was comparatively rare. There was so much tenderness to each other's guilt, such an acquaintance with vice and the different degrees of it, that, unless detected in the fact, it was next to impossible to bring an offence home to the transgressors. And with respect to their intercourse with the natives, though the convicts who suffered from them generally contrived to make out themselves to be in the right; yet, even upon their own showing, every accident that happened was occasioned by a breach of positive orders repeatedly given. In New South Wales, no less than in every other country, obedience to lawful authority was proved to be the safest and best way, after all; nor could that way be forsaken with impunity. [84] See Barrington's History of New South Wales, p. 171. See, too, another instance at p. 385. [85] This conduct was so common, that, when provisions became scarce, the supply was issued _twice_ in the week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays.