These were indeed fine times for the convicts. There was labour for all, remunerative, and not too severe; liquor was cheap, and above all the governor was their friend. It would be, however, more than unfair to charge General Macquarie with any but the best motives in his tenderness for the convict class. He conceived that the unfortunate people who composed it were the especial objects of his solicitude. To promote their reform, and to bring them to that prosperity which should make this reform something more than mere idle profession--these, as he thought, were among the first of his duties as the governor of a penal colony. In his prosecution of such views he did not halt half way. The manner in which he favoured and encouraged the emancipists came to be a by-word. It was said in the colony that the surest claim on Governor Macquarie's confidence and favour was that of having once worn the badge of a convicted felon. Very early in his reign he made it clear that this would be his policy. The year after his arrival he advanced one ex-convict to the dignity of a justice of the peace; another was made his private medical adviser; and both, with many others, were admitted to his table at Government House. Nor were the recipients of these favours always the most deserving among their fellows for the honours showered upon them. It was taken for granted that the possession of considerable wealth was proof positive of respectability regained; yet in the case of Governor Macquarie's emancipist magistrate, it was notorious that he had become rich by methods of which honest men would hardly be proud. Transported as a lad for rick burning, after serving his time in the colony he had been a shop-keeper, a constable, and last a publican; in which line, by means of liberal credit, he had soon amassed a fortune. His case was only one of many in which ex-convicts had grown rich, chiefly by preying on their still more unfortunate comrades, taking mortgages on grants as payment for long arrears of accounts for groceries and drink, and by and by seizing all the land. But no more emancipists were made magistrates after 1824.