The informer was convicted of perjury and the authorities compensated the burnt-out trader, but the ill-feeling was not mitigated. A deputation of miners waited on the Governor to report the irritation engendered by collection of the license fees by “armed men, many of whom were of notoriously bad character”; to complain of the chaining to trees and logs of non-possessors of licenses, and their being sentenced to hard labour on the roads; and to demand the reduction of the fee to 10s. a month. Mr. Latrobe simply told the deputation he would consider the petition; and the deputation went out from his presence to attend a public meeting of Melbourne citizens convened by the Mayor. There some of the delegates spoke with threatening frankness. “What they wanted, they would have; if peacefully, well: if not, a hundred thousand diggers would march like a ring of fire upon Melbourne, and take and act as they listed.” Under threat Mr. Latrobe yielded, and announced that for the month of September no compulsory means would be adopted for the enforcement of the license fee; at the same time inconsistently sending to Forest Creek a detachment of regular soldiers which had reached him. In the beginning of 1854, not before it was time, the weak and vacillating Latrobe was succeeded as Governor of Victoria by the more peremptory Hotham, who was not long in office before he issued a circular ordering the gold-fields police to make a strenuous and systematic search after unlicensed miners, and soon after concentrated several hundred regular soldiers at Ballarat, the centre of a densely thronged gold-field, where an incident had exasperated the chronic irritation of the diggers caused by the rigorous enforcement of the license inquisition. In a Ballarat slum a digger was killed in a scuffle by a fellow named Bentley, an ex-convict who kept a low public-house. The police magistrate before whom Bentley was brought promptly dismissed the charge. He was proved to be habitually corrupt, and there was no doubt that he had been bribed by Bentley’s friends. The miners, enraged by the immunity from punishment of the murderer of one of themselves, gathered in masses round Bentley’s public-house, and sacked and burned it in spite of the efforts of the police to hinder them. Hotham dealt out what he considered even justice all round. He dismissed from office the corrupt magistrate; he had Bentley tried and convicted of manslaughter; and he sent to gaol for considerable terms the ringleaders of the mob who had burnt that fellow’s house. The jurymen who reluctantly found them guilty added the rider, that they would have been spared their painful duty “if those entrusted with the government of Ballarat had done their duty.”