Convicts were required in the towns, as in the country, to be within doors by 8 P. M.; but unhappily this rule was quite a dead letter. The Sydney police was miserably inefficient. Recruited from the convict ranks, they were known on all occasions to favour openly their old associates. If they gave information they were called "noses," which they disliked; or worse, they were hooted, sometimes attacked and half killed. They were known, too, to take bribes, and to be generally most neglectful of their duties. It was not to be expected, therefore, that from them would come any zealous supervision of the convicts still in assignment, even to the extent of sending all such to their homes after 8 P. M., or of preventing the commission of petty offences. But as a matter of fact, the police were never certain whether half the men they met were convicts in assigned service or people actually free. Sydney was by this time so large, and the convicts so numerous, that it was next to impossible for a constable to know every one he met, by sight. None of the assigned servants in towns wore any distinctive dress. Those in government hands wore gray, and the chain-gangs a parti-coloured suit of yellow and brown cloth, but the assigned servants appeared in their masters' liveries, or clothed just as it pleased them. Recognition was not likely to be easy or frequent. Even in our own day, with admirable police machinery, the thorough supervision of criminals at large is not always obtained. In Sydney, seventy years ago, it was lamentably below the mark. Often enough men who had arrived in recent ships, having been assigned in due course, were soon lost sight of, to reappear presently under another name, as men quite free. They had proved themselves so useful that their masters wished to give them sole charge of a business, which, if still convicts, they could not assume. In this way it was discovered that an assigned convict servant had charge of a tan-yard close under the eyes of the police, but here it was proved that the police had connived at a grave neglect of duty.