One other unpleasant feature at the stockades was the official "scourger," as he was called--a convict specially appointed to execute corporal punishment. He was not himself an "iron-gang" man, but came from assigned service together with the convicts' cooks and wardsmen required for the interior economy of the stockade. What with work unremitting, weighty chains that were never removed, isolation from the dissipation of the towns, the convict in the iron-gang was on no bed of roses. Nor could he, under the later régime, escape as easily as he had done heretofore. Sentries with loaded muskets guarded every exit, and they gave him only one chance to halt when summoned, before they fired. After two years' trial Sir Richard Bourke reported that his new system was eminently successful. By its assistance he was at length enabled to dispense altogether with the road parties without irons, which I have already described as being so fruitful of evil to the community at large. Another evil to which I have not referred, and which was attributable to the slackness of control over these road parties and chain-gangs, was the existence of a class of desperadoes sufficiently well known to every reader--I mean the notorious "bushrangers" of the Australian colonies. Certain numbers of these were recruited from among the assigned servants, who absconded when they and their masters could not agree, but by far the greater proportion was furnished by the government gangs, escapes from which were for a long time frequent and generally successful. Whenever a man of courage and ability got away, he collected around him a band of brigands like himself; and then, for periods varying in length according to the nature of the pursuit, these villains subjected the whole neighbourhood to their depredations. They attacked chiefly the outlying huts and houses, but seldom large establishments. One case was known where some sixty men of a chain-gang had plotted to break out simultaneously and make for the bush. Thence they were to march on Macarthur's station, bent on pillage. Nothing came of this plot, because precautions were taken to meet it. But at other times bloody affrays were common enough between the bushrangers and the mounted police. Indeed, it was well known that unless a gang of these highwaymen was entirely exterminated there was no peace for the district in which they were at large. If one survivor escaped he soon became the nucleus of a new gang. What between attacks on dwelling-houses, and the daily stoppage on the highways of carts and wagons, the country generally was most insecure. People went about in fear of their lives.