Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/517

Brigade-Major, of lax domestic relations, accompanied the protégé in calling on the officers of the 48th. All the officers, except the Colonel and two Majors, denied admittance to their would-be visitor. Erskine, nevertheless, at Macquarie's instigation, invited him to the regimental mess. The nature of the issue was fully understood. It was not a question of preserving a decorous forbearance on casually meeting an improper character. The man's character, whether good or bad, was almost immaterial. It was to be decided whether Macquarie could break down all barriers and debase the free element of the population to the level of the convicts, now pouring in at the rate of a thousand a year in a colony where he was doing his utmost to discourage free immigration. To the honour of the junior officers they gallantly braved the vultus instantis tyranni, and abruptly quitted the table. Erskine promulgated an order "that no officer should quit the table until after the first thirds were drank." To obey a regimental order was a duty which involved no private complicity. Macquarie, dissatified with the officers, warned them on parade (1818) not to follow the example of the 46th, and on the same day the protégé, uninvited by the officers, appeared at the mess as Erskine's guest. The officers did not abruptly depart, nor display rudeness; but they so comported themselves that the cause of dispute appeared amongst them no more. Macquarie learned that his high-handed tyranny evoked a spirit of resistance. As the man whom the officers thus repelled was the same whom the Governor endeavoured to smuggle into the position of principal surgeon on D'Arcy Wentworth's retirement, it may be imagined that the indignation of the defeated plotter was unbounded. Many of the facts are to be found in Mr. Bigge's report laid before Parliament; and the impetuous William C. Wentworth (son of D'Arcy Wentworth) was unwise enough to give them further circulation by a violent diatribe in favour of Macquarie's creature and his father's friend.

Another convict, transported for life in 1798 (who like Crossley was an attorney, and had been employed as a clerk in the Secretary's office) was suffered by Macquarie to copy his despatches; and to become a sort of poet-laureate, paying compliments to Macquarie, as the man "to whom a