Penal exile in favour with other nations—Systems of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal—Earliest French ventures—Guiana a fiasco—High sounding names—Renewed attempt—Settlement made in New Caledonia in 1864—Capital at Noumea—Convict population increases—Noumea in 1888—Results of convict labour meagre—Loose discipline and low moral tone—Agricultural settlements—Life at the smaller stations—Arab convicts—Enforced labour unremunerative—Delay in development—The emancipists—Same warfare with free settlers as in Australia—A later view—Visited by Mr. George Griffith in 1900—Free immigrants refuse to remain—Present condition proof of failure of penal exile.

The vast and costly efforts of Great Britain to make use of exile as the penalty for crime, and the strange, unlooked for results achieved, have been set forth. These efforts were undoubtedly successful, although not in the manner expected. To add a great colony to the British Empire was no small feat, even though the sources were impure and the foundations laid by the dregs of society. But the gain was some compensation for the means adopted. In any case, the convict stigma has long since been washed out by honest industry and reputable development. A vast territory, richly endowed, offered special advantages to an enterprising people with the genius of colonisation. Other nations, who overlooked the difficulties faced and overcome by England, have endeavoured to follow in her footsteps, and have made but little progress. France, as we shall see, has gone to great lengths in the practice of deportation, but to no purpose. Portugal still transports her criminals to the African colony of Angola, where the system is established on a small scale and has exhibited no glaring defects. Italy has long favoured the formation of criminal colonies on the many islands that surround her coast, and has removed numbers of prisoners to agricultural stations at Sardinia, to Pianosa and Gorgona in the Tuscan Archipelago, as well as to Monte Cristo and Capraja. Spain had a penal settlement at Ceuta on the north African shore as far back as the fifteenth century, and has more recently added large stations at Melilla and Alhucemas. Spanish experience in convict colonies is said to be satisfactory, but the conditions are much the same as in Australia,—no better, if no worse.

The efforts of France to found penal colonies range far back into history. They date from a period long antecedent to the latest craze for colonial aggrandisement. The very first attempt to sow the seeds of a prosperous community with the failures of society was in 1763, when the colonisation of French Guiana, already often attempted without success, was again tried on an ambitious scale. The project failed miserably. An expedition fourteen thousand strong, recruited mainly from the scum and sweepings of the streets of Paris, melted away within a year, and starvation carried off all whom the deadly climate spared. A second similar experiment was tried in 1766, with a like disastrous result. No serious importance could be attached to the colonising efforts of the victims exiled to Guiana by the revolutionary tribunals. Barely half the number survived the voyage, and the balance were in no condition to act as pioneers. The records of French Guiana are full of such fiascos, the most unsuccessful of which was the philanthropic attempt of the Baron Milius, in 1823, to establish a penal colony on the banks of the Mana, by the marriage and expatriation of habitual criminals, recidivistes, and degraded women,—a most ill-judged undertaking, speedily productive of ghastly horrors.

After this, penal colonisation seems to have fallen into disfavour with France. Not only was it not renewed, but the principle of criminal deportation, of exile as a penalty, was formally condemned in 1847, both by such eminent publicists as MM. Lucas, De Beaumont and De Tocqueville, and by the government of the hour. Yet within a few years the practice was suddenly restored. To the new men in power there was probably something attractive in the theory of transportation, as may be seen from the high-sounding phrases that accompanied their decrees. The idea was not merely to banish the dangerous social elements to a distant soil: the young republic wished to prove that "humanity presided over all its actions." Deportation, with the disciplinary processes that surrounded it, was expected to bring about the moral regeneration of those subjected to it; the criminal would be transformed into a useful citizen; no longer a terror in his old home, he would aid the development of and become a positive benefactor to the new. The government was, indeed, so fascinated by the prospective advantages of transportation to the convicts themselves, that it expected them to accept it as a boon. Registers were opened at all the bagnes, or seaport convict-stations, on which prisoners might inscribe their names as volunteers for the high favour of removal to the promised land beyond the seas. The philanthropic wish to benefit the exile was not, however, the sole object of the government, as may be seen in various articles in the decrees. The hope of founding substantial colonial possessions was not disguised. The convict might benefit by expatriation, but so would his new country, and to a greater degree. He went out, in a measure, for his own good; he remained, perforce, for that of the community. It was ruled that even when emancipated he was to be kept in the colony; those sentenced for eight years and less must spend there a second period as long as the original sentence; those sentenced for more than eight years must remain in the colony for life. Their labour and their best energies were thus impounded for the general good, in the sanguine expectation that they were being utilised in the progress and development of French colonisation.

The revival of transportation was formally promulgated by the law of May, 1854, which declared that thereafter the punishment of travaux forcÉs should be undergone in establishments created in a French colonial possession other than Algeria. As the only available outlet at this time was French Guiana, this tropical colony alone was adopted as a convict receptacle. In doing so, the very first principles of penal legislation were ignored. To consign even convicts to a pestilential climate, and expand the lesser penalty into capital punishment, was a monstrous and illegal misuse of power. Exile to French Guiana meant nearly certain death. For three years every attempt to colonise the country had ended in disaster. Yet the government of Napoleon III accepted deportation with a light heart and on the most extended scale.

The French government, slow to accept the evidence of facts, has never abandoned deportation to Guiana. But it is no longer sanguine of success, and the attempt to colonise is continued with other than native-born Frenchmen. The total convict population of Guiana, as shown in recent French official returns, had dwindled down to 3,441, and of these barely a thousand were Europeans; the rest were Arabs from Algeria, and Annamites, Asiatic blacks from the new French possessions in Cochin-China and Tonquin. The Europeans were made up, in nearly equal proportions, of convicts still undergoing sentence, and emancipists compelled to reside in the colony. Large numbers of both classes are now retained in the penitentiaries on the seacoast, where they can be constantly employed at industrial labour under cover; as at Cayenne, the capital, where vast administrative establishments exist, built at great outlay in more prosperous times.

The French government has sought by every means to encourage the young settlement of Saint Laurent, but its progress has always been disappointing. It has been dependent for some years past upon the Arab recruits, and the French officials already sorrowfully confess that members of the Arab race transplanted to French Guiana are not of the stuff to make good colonists. They are idle, discontented, and a prey to unceasing homesickness. A great effort has been made by the administration to attach the Arab emigrant to the land of exile by transporting thither—I use the words of a late report—"the image of the Arab family, its customs, habits and religion." Marriages are encouraged with Arab women according to the Mussulman law. But little success has attended these well-meant efforts. The Arab soon develops nomadic instincts; he will not stick to one spot, but wanders abroad in search of work which will give him the means of a speedy return to Algeria. Not seldom he shows a clean pair of heels. Escapes in French Guiana have been a source of trouble and annoyance to the authorities. The total number of convicts who had escaped or disappeared from French Guiana between 1852 and 1883 was 3,146; and since Arabs have been sent there, they have supplied the largest proportion of fugitives. They went off in bands; nothing could check them; no surveillance was effective. The Government cutters cruising along the mouth of the river were easily evaded, and the country boats once gained, they were soon out of the colony. A report from the governor-general of Algeria in 1890 states that a great cause of the insecurity of Algeria is the presence in the colony of large numbers of Arab convicts who have escaped from Guiana and returned home. Hence transportation has little terrors for the Arab population, knowing how easily exile may be avoided.

A more remarkable case of escape was that of a French convict sent to Guiana, who was anxious to see the Paris Exposition of 1889. He became possessed of some eight hundred francs through successful gambling, and spent six hundred in taking passage to Amsterdam; he embarked without let or hindrance and went direct to Paris on arrival. He was present at the opening of the exposition, where he stood not far from the president of the republic. Later on he was captured for a fresh offence, and taken to one of the large Paris prisons, where he was at once recognised as a convict exiled not long before to Cayenne. He admitted the charge; he had gratified his wish, had enjoyed quelques bons moments, and was satisfied to go back to Guiana, as he would not have to pay his own passage out. It was, in fact, established beyond question that it was easier to escape from Cayenne, and even New Caledonia, than from a maison centrale in the department of the Seine.

It must be sufficiently plain from the foregoing facts that the attempts to colonise French Guiana with convicts have ended in more or less disheartening failure. Even in sections where the climate was not fatal to Europeans, the conditions of life were opposed to the growth of a prosperous community. There was little increase of population possible. The ill-assorted marriages of convicts with degraded women of their own class proved generally unproductive. Infant mortality was excessive; children born in the colony could never be reared. The substitution of Arabs for Europeans has been accompanied, as I have shown, with little more success. Now, according to a late report of the French Colonial Office, Annamite convicts, hitherto retained in their own country for the completion of various important colonial works, are sent to French Guiana. "The Annamite," says the report hopefully, "is a good agriculturist; he can face the climate of Guiana without danger, and the convicts of this race will doubtless largely contribute to the development and cultivation of the colony."

The melancholy miscarriage of deportation to French Guiana did not suffice to condemn it. The locality was only at fault, it was thought; the system deserved a fuller and fairer trial. France now possessed a better site for experiment, a territory in those same southern seas where English transportation had so greatly prospered. New Caledonia was annexed to France in 1853, but its colonisation had proceeded slowly, and there was only a handful of white population when the first shipload of convicts disembarked in 1864. A town, at this time little better than a standing camp, was planted at Noumea, a spot chosen for its capabilities for defence rather than its physical advantages. It had no natural water supply, and the land around was barren. Exactly opposite lay the little island of Nou, a natural breakwater to the Bay of Noumea, well-watered, fertile, and commanded by the guns of the mainland, and here the first convict depot was established. The earliest work of these convict pioneers was to build a prison-house and to prepare for the reception of new drafts. The labour was not severe, the discipline by no means irksome, and some progress was made. Prison buildings rose upon the island of Nou; a portion of the surrounding land was brought under cultivation, and outwardly all went well. As years passed, the prison population gradually increased. In 1867 the average total was six hundred; in the following year it had increased to 1,554, after which the yearly gain was continuous. Various causes contributed to this, among them the gradual abolition of the bagnes or convict stations at the French arsenals, and the wholesale condemnation of Communists, many of whom were deported to New Caledonia. In 1874 the convict population exceeded five thousand. In 1880 it had risen to eight thousand; and according to recent published official returns, the effective population, taking convicts and emancipists together, numbered nearly ten thousand. From May, 1864, to December 31, 1883, a total of 15,209 convicts had been transported to New Caledonia.

The development of the young colony was slow. Efforts were chiefly concentrated upon the penitentiary island, and the convict labour was but little utilised on the mainland. Those public works so indispensable to the growth and prosperity of the settlement were neglected. The construction of highroads was never attempted on any comprehensive scale, and, notwithstanding the force of workmen available, Noumea, the capital, was not enriched with useful buildings or rendered independent of its physical defects. Henri Rochefort, who saw it in 1872, ridicules its pretensions to be called a town. It might have been built of old biscuit-boxes, he said; imposing streets named from some book of battles—the Rue Magenta and the Rue Sebastopol, the Rue Inkerman and the Avenue de l'Alma—were mere tracks sparsely dotted with huts, single-storied and unpretending. The town lay at the bottom of a basin surrounded by small hills. "It was like a cistern in wet weather, and in the hot season it might be the crater of a volcano." A great mound, the Butte Conneau, blocked up the mouth of the port and inconveniently impeded traffic. Water was still scarce, and, according to Rochefort, a barrel of it would be the most acceptable present to any inhabitant of "Elephantiasopolis," as he christened Noumea from the endemic skin affections. It took ten or a dozen years to improve Noumea. But by 1877 the Butte Conneau had been removed and levelled. About the same time an aqueduct 8000 metres long was completed, which brought water to the capital from Port de France and YahouÉ. A number of more or less ambitious residences had also been erected: a governor's house, bishop's palace, administrative offices, hospitals, and barracks for the troops.

A later account of Noumea is given by M. Verschuur, who visited the Antipodes in 1888-9, and spent some time in New Caledonia. On arrival he was at first much struck by the appearance of Noumea. He was agreeably impressed by the brightness and gaiety of its aspect as compared with "the monotonous appearance of the little English towns" of Australia. CafÉs and taverns were numerous; crowds of lively folk filled the streets through which he drove; and the well-built Government House, surrounded by pretty grounds, looked homelike. A closer inspection much modified his opinion. He remembered the large cities of the neighbouring island continent with their imposing architecture, their fine public gardens, and the prosperous home-like atmosphere pervading every part. "But now I found myself in a small town somewhat resembling those of the Antilles; the houses, which were all alike, were low and roughly built, often of wood. Some of them were no better than the huts of the backwoodsmen I had seen in the Australian bush. The shops were small, and the wares displayed were inferior in quality and of a mixed description. Toys hung side by side with saucepans and boots; calicoes and hats were framed by jams and spirit-bottles. The streets were badly kept and filthy; the roads outside the town had not been properly levelled and the numerous bogs made travelling after dark very dangerous. The only promenade was a public square planted with cocoanut palms, which gave little shade. The harbour was meagre, the quays small and inconvenient; but few ships can load or unload at the same time. If there is one colony more than another where public building might be carried on at the least expense, it is certainly New Caledonia, with its hosts of convicts sentenced to 'hard labour.' In many of the places I had visited, the numerous fine public works had been executed at great cost; but here was a colony where labour would cost nothing and yet it is never utilised. It is a strange anomaly, and a singular waste of means, which might well be used for the advantage and progress of the colony."

According to M. Verschuur, the amount of work gotten out of the convicts was not very great. In his opinion France is maintaining in New Caledonia an "army of drones who find means of evading the labour to which they have been condemned. Many an honest, hard-working French peasant might envy the fate which the government reserves for that part of the population which is steeped in vice and crime. The law passed in 1854 prescribes that the convicts shall be kept to the most laborious works of the colony." As soon as he landed, M. Verschuur heard an excellent band playing in the public square. The bandsmen were all convicts, who played three times a week and practised the rest of the time. Men whose crimes had been the talk of all Paris were employed as gardeners, or in the easiest kind of work, smoking and chatting with their companions. The convicts work, nominally, eight hours a day; they sleep another eight; and then there still remains another eight in which they are absolutely idle. They do less than a quarter of the daily work of an ordinary labourer. In the stone yard they simply work when they see the warder is observing them. "I noticed a gang one day just outside Noumea; out of the sixteen men, twelve were calmly seated on the heap of stones they were supposed to be breaking, rolling cigarettes, and talking; the remaining four made a stroke now and then, when the warder chanced to glance that way. Several times, when travelling in the interior of the country, I have come upon well-known murderers, living in service with the unsuspecting inhabitants." A certain number were regularly employed within the prison of Nou, where M. Verschuur saw them engaged as shoemakers, carpenters, and at the blacksmith's forge. All were busily at work, yet he was certain that before he entered with the prison director, not a soul was doing anything. Great laxity, however, prevailed in these shops. A convict carpenter was permitted to have access to the stores of turpentine and spirits in the workshop, with which abominable mixture he managed to get horribly drunk. Extraordinary license was allowed in another direction. A convict quarrelled with and murdered a comrade; they had been partners in a store kept inside the prison for the sale of coffee, tobacco and spirits. The deeds of partnership had been legally drawn up, and were actually engrossed upon the official paper of the prison. It may be mentioned that this murderer had been twice guilty of murder before and was yet allowed to keep a knife in his possession, which he was seen to sharpen quite unrestrained on the very morning of the last crime.

The influx of convicts produced many projects for their employment over and above the development of Noumea. Following the practice that had prevailed in Guiana, agricultural settlements, half farm, half prison, were established at various points on the mainland. One of the first of these was at Bourail, about a hundred miles from the capital. Another was founded nearer home at Ourail, on the mouth of the Foa. A third was at Canala, on the opposite and northern shore of the island. A fourth was at its eastern end, in the Bay of Prony. Besides these a number of smaller stations were distributed at various points through the colony. The works undertaken were everywhere much of the same kind. At Bourail the sugar cane was cultivated, and various vegetables; at Canala, rice, maize and coffee; at Ourail the land was poor, and the settlement was moved further up the river to Fonway, where the raising of tobacco, and the cultivation of fruit trees and the quinine bush were attempted; at the Bay of Prony the convicts became woodcutters to supply fuel for the rest of the colony.

The inner life of one of the smaller stations, the labour camp of Saint Louis, has been graphically described by M. Mayer, a political transport, who published the "Souvenirs d'un DeportÉ," relating his personal experiences, on his return to France. This camp consisted of 124 convicts, a heterogeneous collection, herded together indiscriminately in the wretched cases, or straw-thatched huts, the prevailing prison architecture of New Caledonia. Among these, of whom forty were political and non-criminal convicts, there were twenty-six Arabs, four Chinamen and two negroes. Several notorious desperadoes, Frenchmen born, were associated with the rest. One had been at the head of a band of poisoners of Marseilles; another, who had murdered a girl in Paris, had been arrested and sentenced during the Commune by a Communist commissary, who, by a strange fate, was now his comrade convict in this same camp of Saint Louis. Except for the scantiness of diet and the enforced association with the worst criminals, M. Mayer did not find the work hard. The hours of labour varied; the daily minimum was eight, the maximum from ten to twelve. But the work performed was desultory and generally unproductive. The principal aim was to clear the land by removing the rocks, which were afterward broken up for road-making material. The supervision was lax and ineffective; the few warders were most active in misappropriating rations. The chief warder himself, who had a fine garden and poultry yard, stole the wine and soft bread issued for the sick. Many convicts eked out their meagre fare by cooking roots and wild fruits, pommes de lianes and Caledonian saffron.

The lot of the Arabs was most enviable; they monopolised all situations of trust. One was the quartermaster, another the chief cook, and others worked as carpenters, bootmakers, and blacksmiths. The baleful practice of putting one convict in authority over another, long condemned by enlightened prison legislators, was always in full force in New Caledonia. Strange to say, too, the French authorities preferred to choose their felon overseers from an alien race. The Arabs seem to have found most favour with their masters, although, if Mayer is to be believed, these Arab officials were all fierce, untamed ruffians. Yet they were entrusted with great authority over their less fortunate comrades, and were especially esteemed for the vigour with which they administered corporal punishment. Mayer has preserved the picture of one Algerian savage, six feet high, who went about seeking quarrels and striking his fellow convicts on the smallest excuse. This man was considered an artist with the martinet, or French cat-o'-nine-tails, and was said to be able to draw blood at the first stroke.

It is an admitted axiom in penal science that enforced labour is not easily made productive. Unless peculiar incentives to work, such as provided by the English mark system, are employed under a strict yet enlightened discipline, the results have always been meagre and disappointing. As these conditions were absent from New Caledonia, the consequences are what might have been foreseen. Notwithstanding the very considerable efforts made and the vast quantity of convict labour always available, the colony still owns no great public works; while large and sustained efforts to develop its agricultural resources by the same means have also failed. No doubt the nature of the soil has been unfavourable.

New Caledonia, while not without its natural advantages, such as a nearly perfect climate, freedom from reptiles and animal life inimical to man, is not very richly endowed except in unprospected and undeveloped mineral wealth. The island consists of a rugged backbone of mountains clothed with dense forests and grooved with rushing torrents, along whose banks lie the only cultivable ground. A thin and sandy soil covers a substratum of hard rock, which makes but scanty return for the labour bestowed and serves best for pasturage. Hence the convict farms already referred to have never been profitably worked. Those especially of Bourail and Koe, the largest and most ambitious, show a positive loss. At the former only three and a half tons of sugar were turned out in one year by four hundred men, and ten years of toil had brought only fifty hectares of land into cultivation. At Koe, five years' receipts were valued at 50,000 francs, and the expenses for the same period just trebled that sum. In 1883 the minister of marine approved the suppression of the penitentiary farms on the island of Nou and at Canala, and the limitation of the sugar cane cultivation at Bourail, on the ground that the returns were altogether inadequate to the outlay.

It was only too evident, as the outcome of early years, that efforts had been misdirected, and that the labour had been wasted and frittered away instead of being more usefully employed for the benefit of the whole colony. One signal instance of the shortcomings of the colonial administrators is shown by their neglect to develop the means of internal communication. It was not until 1883, that is to say, after nearly twenty years of colonial life, that road-making, that indispensable preliminary to development, was undertaken on any extensive scale. New Caledonia, an island 230 miles long and 50 miles broad, owned only 57 kilometres of road before the year 1882. It was Captain Pallu de la Barriere, a governor whose administration was severely criticised on account of his excessive humanitarianism, but whose views as regards the utilisation of convict labour were far-seeing, who removed this reproach. His idea was to substitute what he called movable camps for the bagnes sedentaires or permanent penitentiaries. He thought that the severest toil should be the lot of all convicts, at least at first; and this, he conceived, could be best compassed by employing them in road-making, thus benefiting the colony while effectively punishing the convict. His whole scheme of organisation reads like a page from the despatches of British colonial governors some thirty years previous. The measures he proposed, his plans for housing the convicts and providing for their safe custody, were almost identical with those in force with the road-gangs of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. He was very hopeful; he had no fear of escapes or of aggravated misconduct scattered over the wide area which he now proposed to people with convict gangs. His intentions were no doubt excellent, but in the twenty years following the initiation of his scheme they have borne no very substantial fruit.

The colonial administration has found even less satisfaction in the emancipists than in the convicts still under restraint. The former are a great and increasing body, for whom work cannot easily be found. The hope that the labour markets of the colony would absorb a great proportion soon proved illusory. For some time past the free colonists, by no means a numerous class, have declined to employ emancipists, declaring that while they claimed the free man's wages they would not give the free man's work. The settlers preferred to import native labour from the neighbouring islands, especially the New Hebrides, thus coming into direct conflict with the authorities, who soon put their veto on such importation. The settlers were told that if they wanted hands they must seek them among the emancipists, and all protests were silenced by reminding the colonists that New Caledonia was a penal settlement and that if they lived there they must abide by its constitution. At this time there were some four or five thousand emancipists living as free charges, lodged, fed and clothed at the cost of the state, yet making absolutely no return. The greater number of these were kept in a military camp under some semblance of discipline, but undergoing little restraint beyond the prohibition to wander abroad, and within the limits of the camp the occupants could do as they pleased.

Later and more specific information is now at hand in the accounts brought back by an enterprising traveller, Mr. George Griffith, who visited New Caledonia in 1900. The penal colonisation undertaken by France with such philanthropic motives, and so sedulously carried out, has resulted in failure. The experience is the same as that of New South Wales and Tasmania; the penalty of banishment and penal exile inflicted upon the majority of convicts has been accomplished, but not the regeneration, to any appreciable extent, of the criminal classes. Their conversion into a prosperous community, self-reliant, self-supporting and able to stand alone, is still a vague, unrealised dream. All the conditions that favoured the growth of its great neighbour have been absent in New Caledonia, and it was hampered also by special disadvantages. There has been none of the steady influx of free settlers such as immigrated to Australia when first difficulties were removed, nor yet the amazing stimulus of the discovery of gold as on the near-by continent. Peculiar racial disadvantages have further impeded development.

The present state of New Caledonia affords abundant proof of the truth of this position. It will doubtless never advance to the rank of a first-class colony. It is still and must always be a prison house beyond sea peopled mainly by convicts past or present, by those in various stages of ameliorating change, but who cannot shake off the original taint, and the general low level is maintained by constant reinforcement of those who have it full upon them. To-day the larger part of the population of the colony is based upon the criminal element, which is divided into three principal classes: First, the forÇats, or convicted prisoners still in a state of servitude; second, the libÉrÉs or emancipists in semi-freedom, who emerge in due course from the first class, and, third, the relÉgues or those sent from France to serve a sentence of perpetual exile. There is hope in the future for the first, partially attained freedom and approaching comfortable assurance for the second, but for the last named there is nothing but black despair. Life alone remains theirs, but with not the faintest prospect of remission or release.

It is obvious that under such conditions healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical being in a colony of lepers. Free emigrants may declare it their intention, but they will not persevere in the attempt to build up new homes under such false conditions; they will not leave the mother country, or if they do, will take the earliest opportunity to return to the hard, clean, industrious life of agricultural France. We have seen that, with the larger influx of the vigorous Anglo-Saxon, the same difficulties were faced and overcome; but at what risks, what degradation and how great a waste of men and means!

New Caledonia is nevertheless an interesting study, and its present condition an object lesson in penal legislation. It is a prison planted in the tropics, to a large extent worked and governed on the same lines as the prisons in the heart of a mother country. Wrong-doers are transported to the other end of the globe to endure a penalty that might be better inflicted, more cheaply and under better supervision and control, by the strong arm of an omnipresent public opinion at home. Some remote advantages are no doubt obtained in the later stages of the terms of imprisonment, and at least society is rinsed effectively of its lees and leavings.

The principal home for the forÇats in the penal stage of exile is still on the island of Nou, already mentioned and immediately opposite Noumea, the capital of the colony, which is now, after fifty years of life, a pretty white town of villas and squares, and streets of shops brightened by a luxuriant tropical vegetation. On the island of Nou a pleasant looking settlement of white houses and shady streets has been formed at the foot of a hill crowned with the imposing and extensive prison buildings. On this commanding site and at this remote point, so-called penitentiary science has planted the same sort of machine for the coercion of erring humanity as may be seen nearly everywhere else on the civilised globe. The latest experiment is being made with the oldest methods. Here are separate cells, dark cells and condemned cells, bolts and bars, iron doors and loaded revolvers. France desires to emancipate her criminals and set them on the high road to regenerated life, but they must tread the old thorny paths and suffer the same trials by the way as their predecessors elsewhere. Discipline must be maintained, and it is enforced at times by terrible means. The lash and the "cat-o'-nine-tails" are not permitted, but a most ingenious deceptive method of torture has been invented, mild enough at first sight, yet more cruel than the rack, thumb-saw or boot.

Mr. George Griffith's description of the punishment as it existed when he saw it—happily much modified soon afterward—is horrifying in the extreme. The "black cell" was absolutely isolated. Not a sound reached it, not a ray of light penetrated it, and in his day the doors were only opened once in thirty days, when the hapless inmate was extracted for an hour's exercise and the doctor's inspection. The effect of this treatment may be best realised by Mr. Griffith's own words when he was permitted to extend relief to one of the inmates.

"Out of the corner (of the cell) came something in human shape, crouching forward, rubbing its eyes and blinking at the unaccustomed light. It had been three years and a half in that horrible hole about three yards long and half as wide. I gave him a feast of sunshine and outer air by taking his place for a few minutes. After the first two or three, the minutes lengthened into hours. I had absolutely no sense of light. I was as blind as though I had been born without eyes. The blackness seemed to come down on me like some solid thing and drive my straining eyes back into my head. It was darkness that could be felt, for I felt it, and the silence was like the silence of upper space. When the double doors opened again, the rays of light seemed to strike my eyes like daggers. The criminal whose place I had taken had a record of infamy which no printable words could express, and yet I confess I pitied him as he went back into that living death of darkness and silence."

The extreme penalty of death is by no means rare in New Caledonia, and the condemned cells in the prison of the island of Nou, six in number, are sometimes simultaneously full. An execution in that far-off place of penitence reproduces the scene in Paris; the preliminaries are the same and the ceremony is identical. The same cruel uncertainty hangs over the fate of the condemned, who hears his doom only an hour or two before he is guillotined. The commandant of the island, the chaplain and the chief warden, visit him at three o'clock in the morning and convey the dread summons, c'est pour aujourdhui, the final, fatal decision he has been awaiting day after day for weeks. Then follows la toilette de la mort, the dressing for death, when the headsman "Monsieur de l'Ile Nou," pinions him and cuts away the collar of his shirt lest it should break the fall of the swiftly descending knife.

The actual performance takes place in the great courtyard, where the scaffold has been erected and the audience is ready. All the great officials of the colony are there, and a sufficient number of troops to overawe the body of convicts arranged row behind row within full view of the stage to which the principal performer ascends. He is allowed to make a short address to his comrades, kneeling and bareheaded before him. Then he is put into position upon a sloping plank, which slides into place so that his neck is pushed out through an opening and is ready for the swift-falling blade.

The forÇats are distributed all over the colony where there is work in progress, on farms and agricultural stations, clearing forest primeval and in mining operations of a very arduous character. The idle and ill-conducted, the incorrigible who will not labour and are in a chronic state of insubordination, are committed to disciplinary camps partly for punishment, partly for seclusion. Nowhere is the rÉgime more severe, the daily rations less, the daily task harder. There are none of the small luxuries of wine and tobacco, and they sleep on guard beds with a leg in iron chained to a bar at the end. The penalty of solitary confinement on bread and water is promptly inflicted for any breach of discipline, and those who prove perfectly intractable are sent as hopeless to the cells of the central prison at the island of Nou. Henceforth there is no further change—they are deemed hopeless and incurable.

One form of punishment is peculiar to these camps. It might be called perpetual motion. A number of convicts, twenty or thirty, are ranged in single rank in a large shed, some sixty feet in length and forty in breadth, and set to march round and round incessantly, pausing only for a couple of minutes every half hour. Stone seats, each a kind of flat topped pyramid, are fixed at intervals around the shed and afford a brief rest from time to time, but the march is speedily resumed and continues from dawn to sunset of the nearly interminable day.

The tardy development of the colony has been shown as it was at an earlier date. Twenty years more and it still lags behind. After forty years of occupation, with an average total of from eight to ten thousand able-bodied criminals available, but little progress has been made. The colony is still but sparsely provided with roads. The internal communications are barely fifty miles in length; one road, fit only for two-wheeled traffic and thirty miles in length, connects Noumea with Bailoupari, and there are some short roads in the agricultural settlement of Bourail. There are as yet no railways and no network of telegraphic wires. All of the transit from point to point is performed by small coastwise steamers.

Bourail is the show place where the forÇats blossom into the emancipists, and where penal labour is replaced by individual effort of the state-aided freedmen, the criminal who has expiated his offence and is now to make himself a new life. Liberal assistance is given to those who intend to do well. After fair assurance of amendment, the forger or assassin, the unfortunate felon who got into the clutches of the law, gets a new start, a concession of land with capital advanced to stock it, materials to build his home, tools and agricultural implements, six months' food, and seed to sow the first harvest. Some of them thrive and prosper exceedingly; it is much the same as in early Australian days, but no doubt to a lesser degree, for not a few fail and must return to servitude with more successful comrades or free settlers. There are those who champion the system as the best solution of the disposal of the worst offenders who cannot be rehabilitated under the conditions existing in a country long settled. The logic is a little weak perhaps, and it is difficult to concede that crime should be the official avenue to state assistance.

A good story is told of one reformed criminal who prospered exceedingly and was congratulated by the governor of the colony when he came up to receive the prize awarded for raising first-class stock. He was reminded how by the fostering care of a paternal government he had been transformed from the degraded forÇat into an honest owner of property. The ex-convict was moved to tears, but his emotion was caused by his regretting the time he had lost before he came to benefit by the change. "Had I had any idea of the good fortune awaiting me," he whined, "I would have arrived here ten years sooner." In other words, he would have qualified ten years earlier by committing the deed which resulted in his transportation—cutting his wife's throat.

The boons extended to the reformed one are not limited to a life of ease and comfort in the colony. Rehabilitation may be earned, and with it permission to return to the mother country with the restoration of civil rights. Several have sold their farms and effects to the colony, and have gone home to France as rentiers. Their reappearance hardly tends to emphasise the deterrent effect of penal exile.

That the conditions in New Caledonia were until within the last few years in many respects more encouraging, and that the labour of the colonists was increasingly productive, may be gathered from the following extract from the London Times in 1890:

"The governor states that agriculture, which has hitherto been of only secondary importance, seems to be entering upon a period of rapid development under the influence of the fresh means of action afforded it by the immigration from the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia will produce this year 400 tons of coffee, while it is expected that in four years' time the production will exceed 1,000 tons. The cultivation of the sugar cane and of wheat is also making good progress.... The governor reports that what New Caledonia is most deficient in is labour, but he adds that the work done by the convicts, and especially at the Thio penitentiary, is much more satisfactory than that of the convicts in Guiana, while the men who have served their time and who choose can always find employment at wages from 4s. to 5s. a day, and at piece work they in many cases earn 10s. a day."

Some ten years later reports continued to be favourable as to the prosperity of New Caledonia. According to the governor, the population was steadily increasing and the demand for the minerals mined on the island was so great that it could not be satisfied. In 1903, however, the Times published a news item stating that "emigration from France has practically ceased and numbers of colonists have left," the cause of the exodus being the high taxation and great cost of living. In the same year, the agent-general for South Australia wrote to the French government pointing out how anxious Australia was to see the use of New Caledonia as a penal settlement abandoned, and a date fixed after which prisoners should not be sent to the Pacific.