Yet all this expenditure was not only wasteful and at the time unnecessary, but its direct tendency was to demoralise the population. The labourers required for works of such importance were of course collected together upon the scene of operations. In other words, crowds of convict artisans were congregated in the towns, and countenanced each other in vice. Many of the works were carried out by contract, the contractors employing convict hands, bond or free, still serving or emancipated; and in both cases they paid wages half in cash, and half in property, which consisted of groceries and ardent spirits. This was the "truck system," neither more nor less, which the contractors made still more profitable to themselves by establishing public-houses close to their works, at which the cash half of the wages soon returned to them in exchange for the drink supplied. Naturally vice and immorality grew apace. The condition of the towns was awful, and the low pleasures in which they abounded attracted to them many people who might otherwise have been contented to live quietly upon their grants of land. But the choice between congenial society with plenty of drink, and the far-off clearing with honest labour for its only joy, was soon made in favour of the former, and every one who could, flocked into the towns. The governor had indeed tried hard to form an agricultural population. With this object he had conceded larger grants than his predecessors, in the hopes that emancipated convicts would settle upon them and reform. It was thought that "the hope of possessing property, and of improving their condition and that of their families, afforded the strongest stimulus to their industry, and the best security for their good conduct." But these advantages were remote, and gave way at once before the present certainty of being able to barter away the land they got for nothing or in exchange for ten or fifteen gallons of rum. If this plan of manufacturing industrious small proprietors out of the recently emancipated convicts was meant to answer, the grant of land should have been made conditional on actual residence thereon, and accompanied by tangible results gained by actual labour done, which must be shown before the acres were finally conveyed. Now it was proved that many of Governor Macquarie's grantees never took possession of their land at all: the order for thirty acres was changed at once for the much coveted means of dissipation. Hence, though towns grew fast in beauty and importance, the forest lands or wild tracts in the interior remained unsettled; and the crowds of ex-criminals who might, by judicious treatment, have turned into virtuous farmers, rapidly degenerated into a mass of drunken dissipated idlers.