To each party of three hundred seven overseers were attached, without constables or other restraint. The sub-division of these parties in labor left them often to the practical oversight of a single person, and he an expiree. Thus they were able to make excursions for the purposes of robbery and pleasure: their clothing tended rather to disguise than distinguish them. As the terms of their service expired they were discharged in the prison dress, and no one could tell whether they were or not illegally at large. Escaped prisoners have been known to walk through bodies of men on the road without challenge. In several instances robberies were committed on travellers within the precincts of the stations. The enclosures were often merely the common garden fence. The judges avowed that in passing sentence for crimes they could not punish them with severity, considering the strong temptations of the men. Remembering the number virtually and legally at large, the degree of safety, or rather the instances of exemption from pillage, must be considered almost miraculous. A great portion of minor crimes were not prosecuted, and a still larger number were undetected; but eight hundred recorded crimes--a scourge to ten thousand families, and full of terror and danger to all--would not seem extravagant when divided among thirty thousand prisoners. The despatches of Wilmot to Lord Stanley described with accurate minuteness the social effects of the probation system. Those who remember his apparent apathy when those evils were the topics of colonial complaint will deplore the strange fidelity to his political chief which induced him to conceal his own sentiments from the colonists. He stated that the territory was inundated with unemployed prisoners; that no labor being in demand, they must either starve or steal; that a yearly increasing pauper population, without adding one atom to colonial wealth, would swell the catalogue of crime and increase the public expense in every form; that the number out of employment was fearfully great; and that land--cleared, fenced, in complete cultivation, with houses and buildings--might be bought at the upset price of waste land. To remedy these evils he proposed the extension of conditional pardons to the Australian colonies, the remission of the price of crown lands to emigrants, and the letting of allotments at a nominal rental for seven years to conditionally pardoned men, with a contingent right of purchase.[242]