that elapsed between Governor Phillip's departure and the arrival of his successor, but also during the long period of gradual but increasing improvement which followed the last event. Yet, while the improvement of the little colony was evidently steady and increasing, when its affairs are regarded in a temporal point of view, in morals its progress appeared to be directly contrary; and, painful though it be to dwell upon the sins and follies of men, whose bodies have long since passed away to their parent dust, and their souls returned to God who gave them, nevertheless, there are many wholesome lessons of instruction and humiliation to be gathered from the history of human depravity in New South Wales. One of the crying sins of the mother country,--a sin now very much confined to the lower classes of society, but fifty years ago equally common among all classes,--is that of _drunkenness_; and it could scarcely be expected that the outcast daughter in Australia would be less blamable in this respect than the mother from which she sprang.[102] Accordingly, we find that as soon as it was possible to procure spirits, at however great a sacrifice, they were obtained, and intoxication was indulged in,--if such brutality deserves the name of indulgence,--to an awful extent. Whether all that a writer very intimately acquainted with New South Wales urges against the officers of the New South Wales Corps be true or not, so far as their dealings in spirituous liquors are concerned, there can be no question that these mischievous articles became almost entirely the current coin of the settlement, and were the source of worldly gain to a few, while they proved the moral ruin of almost all, in the colony. But, without giving entire credit to all the assertions of Dr. Lang, who deals very much in hasty notions and exaggerated opinions,[103] we may sorrowfully acknowledge that, if the convicts in New South Wales gave way in a horrible manner to drunkenness and its attendant sins, the upper classes, in general, either set them a bad example, or made a plunder of them by pandering to their favourite vice. The passion for liquor, it is stated by Collins,[104] operated like a mania, there being nothing which the people would not risk to obtain it: and while spirits were to be had, those who did any extra labour refused to be paid in money, or in any other article than spirits, which were then so scarce as to be sold at six shillings a bottle. So eagerly were fermented liquors sought after, and so little was the value of money in a place where neither the comforts nor luxuries of life could be bought, that the purchaser has been often known, in the early days of the colony, to name himself a price for the article he wanted, fixing it as high again as would otherwise have been required of him. When the few boat-builders and shipwrights in the colony had leisure, they employed themselves in building boats for those that would pay them their price, namely, five