The subordinate authorities were supposed to partake the license of their superiors. One commandant, Colonel Geils, fixed a spiked collar on the neck of a free woman; another flogged a female through Hobart Town for abusive language; and another tied up a free man on the spot, for placarding a grievance, when as yet there was no press.[85] Davey, having ordered a person to the triangles, answered his remonstrances with a pleasant jest: the sufferer reminded him that he could not flog him; the governor answered that "he would try," and the flagellator soon determined the problem in favor of authority. Indignant exclamations of free men were deemed preposterous by a body of officials, who regarded the diffidence of civil government as absurd, and considered power as the standard of right. The administration of justice is described by a work of the times:--"I have known," wrote a contemporary witness, "men, without trial, sentenced to transportation by a single magistrate at his own door: free men, after being acquitted by a court of criminal judicature, banished to another of the dependant settlements. I have heard a magistrate tell a prisoner (then being examined for a capital offence, and who had some goods, supposed to be stolen, for which he would not account), that were he not going to be hanged so soon, he (the magistrate) would make him say whence he got them. I have known depositions destroyed by the magistrate."[86] The courts were limited by the laws in force within the _realm_, but the realm was not defined;[87] and thus what portion of the law was applicable, was left in thirty years' doubt, until the commissioner royal stated that the omission had prevented several executions.[88] The same number of years were required to ascertain whether laws passed in Great Britain subsequent to the era of colonisation were the laws of the colony. Law officers of the crown were permitted to define authoritatively the import of acts of parliament, and on their official decisions the colonial judge convicted, and the governor executed a criminal.[89] The persons commissioned as justices constituted a court in avowed conformity with such tribunals in England, but they adjudicated on the orders of the governor, and inflicted the penalties he appointed; though the supreme court, sitting concurrently with these "benches," rejected the legislation of the governor as invalid, when the basis of an action: one judge supported them by his moral countenance, although he knew them to be without legal authority.[90] Judge Advocate Wylde, however, declared the legislative authority of the governor equally binding with acts of parliament--a doctrine never surpassed by the most subservient advocates of an unlimited monarchy.[91]