were committed by the "old hands," and that any man arrested for any criminal offence had been "sent out." Thus, when Mr. Lachlan M'Lachlan was appointed police magistrate of Bendigo, he merely expressed openly the opinion held by other magistrates, and the public generally, when he declared that nearly all thefts were perpetrated by "old hands." He asserted that he could distinguish a convict from a free man at a glance. He would order the police to make the prisoner walk down the court, and would exclaim: "Turn him round again, sergeant. Ah! I thought so! I can see the marks of the irons on his legs."[37] By which he meant that the man had acquired a sort of limp through wearing irons, and that he could detect it. All such men were sent to gaol for six or twelve months, not so much for the crime or offence with which they stood charged, as because they were ex-convicts. And generally the public endorsed this apparent injustice. "It's a pity we ain't got more magistrates like Bendigo Mac," was an expression frequently heard in all parts of the colony. It is not impossible that the fashion of crediting all crimes and offences to convicts, however unjust it may have been, tended to prevent others from committing crimes. Whether this was so or not, it is certain that the diggers, rough and careless as the majority of them were, steadily set their faces, as a class, against crime, and never hesitated, even during the height of their dispute with the authorities, to hand over to the police any person detected in stealing. Probably they were forced into this attitude in self-defence. The diggings were merely huge camps, everybody living in tents or "houses" made of wooden rafters and uprights, covered with calico or canvas. Even the big hotels and theatres were calico structures. It was so easy for an evil-disposed person to rip open a tent and thrust his hand under the pillow or into any other place where he thought gold might be concealed. But such thefts, although numerous, constituted only a minority of the crimes committed on the goldfields. All round were holes twenty or thirty feet deep, and the paths from one part of the field to another wound in and out between these holes, so that it was dangerous for a stranger in the locality to travel about after dark. In such a place it was so easy to stab a man and throw his body down a hole that the very facilities offered operated as a temptation to murder. Scarcely a day passed without a body being found murdered and rifled, and thus a peculiar sort of morality was developed on the diggings, and the diggers, while resisting the police, jeering at them and showing their hatred of them in every possible way, still assisted them in capturing thieves and other criminals. It was the custom to call public meetings for political and other purposes, by sending men to all the various camps each carrying a tin dish. These heralds would beat their tin dishes and yell, "Roll up! roll up!"