cover, in warehouses, on board ship amongst the sails and cordage, etc. The convict on this list receives from 5 to 20 centimes a day (from d. to 2d.), of which the government retains a third; half of what is left being given as a masse de réserve when he is freed, the other half deposited with the maire of his commune. Our author is somewhat enthusiastie on the easy life of these men condemned to "les travaux forcés." He ridicules the idea of their work being hard or painful, or they themselves discontented or turbulent. They go, he says, to their work calmly, without constraint and without bad humour; 16 to 24 men accompanied by only one guard with a loaded carabine on his shoulder; this "inoffensive and brave 'garde,' tranquilly seated, his carabine between his legs, and assuredly more crushed under the torpor of ennui than they under the weight of labour. When they walk even slowly and without fatigue, no harsh word, no bad treatment, hastens their movements, or renders their task onerous and painful." In fine, the forçats are, he says, less badly off than solitary confinement or the Maisons Centrales would have made them, and less hard worked than the generality of free ouvriers.

At Brest, there is a kind of bazaar of articles made by the forçats, and sold by some of the better conducted. These are men who have passed into the salle d'épreuve, of which we spoke before. They are better treated than the ordinary convict in every respect. Their food includes fresh meat once a week; while the ordinary forçat has only bread and beans, or biscuit and haricots, and not enough of these. Indeed, many of them positively suffer from hunger. Those who receive funds from their families may certainly buy any luxuries they like, éprouvé or not; but they are the exceptions.

When

They go to bed at eight o'clock; five or six hundred in one dormitory. Twenty-five benches in a line-like lits de camp, back to back, and called "tollards"-accommodate, on each bench, twenty-four convicts, twelve in a row, lying on an inclined plane. Each man has a coverlet of coarse grey woollen; and to each his particular number of inches is rigorously marked out. laid down, all the chains of one row are fastened to the ramas, and the whistle of the guardian gives the signal of sleep and silence. But, as none of these poor wretches can stir without every one in the row feeling it—as a rondier" goes the rounds all through the night, tapping with a hammer at the bars of the grilles as he passes, to see that they have not been tampered with-as very many complain, and often the turnkeys swearone can understand what kind of sleep the whistle of the superintendent signals to the unhardened!

Not only guards and turnkeys, but spies among themselves, keep the forçat population in good order. But, when once the

spy is known," the wet dock for him" (gare à lui)! He is either thrown into the sea, or crushed beneath a mass of stones, or secretly stabbed by one to whom the lot had fallen to do the job: one way or another, he is sure to be got rid of. Religious and moral care left entirely out of the forçat's daily life; his own moral condition, if slightly improved from the terrible traditions of the past, yet still in a fearfully low state; his life a life of toil, of vices without name, of hopelessness, and evil; his death the simple wiping out of a number from the superintendent's books; no loving sorrow for the time that, with its affections and its duties, is ebbing away; no hope, no joy, no surety, in the dread eternity that is rushing on a poor worn wretch, bowed down with guilt and pain, sullenly quitting this world to stand before a righteous God;-such is the life, and such the death, of a forçat of the Bagne-of the man whose sins have given his brother man the power to crush all light and virtue and humanity out of him. The Bagnes are now in a state of temporary suspension, while transportation is under trial. We trust, contrary to M. Lepelletier, that they will not be continued on the chance of a better system of regulation. Such as they are and have been, let them pass from the penal code of France for ever. The traditions of so much hideous evil hang too closely round them to render their reinstatement wholesome. The failures of the past are best swept clean away, and new systems and new names adopted for the needs of the future.

Banishment stands, after death, the highest in the scale of severity for political offences. Of this there are two kinds: the first, banishment within fortifications-as to the Valley of Vaïthau in the island of Tahuata, one of the Marquesas, for those who would formerly have been condemned to death; the second, simple banishment to a certain spot, without fortifications or material appliances of imprisonment as to the Valley of Taïohaé, in the island of Noukahiva, also one of the Marquesas. The first sentence includes total civil degradation; the second allows. the exercise of civil rights in the place of banishment. But banishment has hitherto been rather a theoretic than a practical law. On the 20th December 1851, there certainly were three men sentenced by the Lyons Council of War to banishment, together with their wives and families. They were to be sent to Taïohaé, the station second in degree of severity. After a voyage of five months and a half duration, they anchored in the Bay of Taïohaé, where they were received with the greatest kindness by the missionaries and officials. They cost the State 150,000 fr. (L.6000) the first year; and, after a short sojourn, the Emperor "gave them the hope of return;" and by this time,

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perhaps, they and their wives and families are sailing back to France again. Banishment may pass, then, as a written, not an actual, law of punishment. It is a legal luxury, a penal gentilesse, that reads very well on paper, but is in fact null.

Transportation, with hard labour, is intended to supersede the Bagnes. This too has been but an experiment, of which the following is the chief instance :

On the 31st of March 1852, a ship-load of forçats, 311 in number, sailed from Brest for French Guiana. In less than five months seventeen merchant vessels had followed, carrying materials for the convict colony. Huts, a steam saw-mill, tools of all kinds, instruments, a sumptuous wardrobe, luxurious sleeping_appurtenances, including musquito curtains, a perfectly stocked pharmacopeia, and other luxuries of civilized life, made up their freight. A large number of guards, sisters of charity, doctors, surgeons, assistants, priests, and others, were appointed to the personal service of the prisoners; and, as a final provision of success, only picked men were chosen for the expedition-the strongest and the best behaved men to be found in the prisons of France. Moreover, they were joined at the Antilles by sixty black prisoners, associated with the expedition for the express purpose of doing such labour as the white man could not perform. It should not be forgotten that the dietary table included fresh meat, milk, vegetables, etc., etc.; in fact, such a dietary table as is not always in use in the houses of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. On the 10th of May, then, this trial convoy disembarked at the Salutation Islands, and the experiment commenced.

The first governor, M. Sarda Garriga, was soon recalled. His philanthropic zeal and reformatory extremes did not suit the public at home. Originally, it had been decreed that the convicts should have the power of marrying, so as to create for them "the family," to which social condition so much moral influence is due. M. Sarda Garriga went beyond the general interpretation of the authorizing clause, which, according to most, only allowed the family already existing to settle in the colony near the convict husband, or reserved the right of marriage for the free, or the provisionally freed. Amongst his first acts was a project for making a road between the Silver Mountain, where the male prisoners were lodged, to the Coumarouma Mountain opposite, destined for the female prisoners, so as to permit "des relations fréquentes entre les condamnés des deux sexes, pour arriver aux unions qui doivent achever de réhabiliter nos transportés en leur créant une famille." This was an afterthought on his first plan of installing the wives of the convicts on the Coumarouma Mountain. He also allowed plays, fête

days, triumphal arches, etc.-doubtless of great individual use, but not according to the notion of penal discipline generally. M. Fourrichon, the new governor, soon changed all that; and the convict colony of Guiana was in full activity on its new system. By May 1853, 2146 convicts were dispersed among the various stations, of whom 711 were in hospital when that year's report was sent home; and, though the health of the current month was reported good, there had been thirty-seven deaths. M. Lélut, speaking of this report, said truly, that Guiana "was no penal, but rather a death colony!" It was a difficult undertaking altogether. M. le Commissary-General expressed himself thus:

"Calmer les inquiétudes et dissiper les préventions des habitants: installer sur la terre ferme cette population des bagnes rendue à l'air et à l'espace; voilà deux grandes tâches à remplir; ce n'est rien moins que la colonisation de ce beau pays, aujourd'hui vaste désert, à reprendre à nouveau sur de nouvelles bases. La position du gouvernement locale dans la Guyane est plus difficile qu'elle n'a jamais été, car il s'agit tout à la fois de rendre à la vie une colonie agonisante et de créer une colonie pénale. Le secours actuel le plus nécessaire pour cet établissement est celui d'une police énergique et bien centralisée.”

M. le contre-amiral Fourrichon soon sent home a statement, that the establishment on the Silver Mountain had not realized the advantages anticipated, and that henceforth Haut-Oyapok was to be the principal point, the Silver Mountain being kept only as a poste de transition. This change was to cost only two thousand franes, and no other expenses were to be incurred. In the month of July, he said (this statement was sent home in April), a hundred prisoners would be employed on the Haut-Oyapok works; by the end of Angust, three hundred. Health, condition, moral as well as social, productive labour,-all were to be placed on the highest possible point of development by this change in the scene of action; and "if," says M. Fourrichon, "the experiment does not succeed, at least we must not blame local circumstances."

By May, forty-nine convicts are at Oyapok; by June, eightyeight; with the confession, that "unforeseen difficulties" retarded the progress of this establishment, backed up by details of revolts, flights, murders of convicts by each other, shootings of convicts attempting to escape by the guards, etc., etc. In September M. Fourrichon was recalled, after six months' experiments and non-success. M. Bonard succeeded him. The report of January 1854 announces almost a general revolt of the convicts, "stirred up thereto by the political prisoners;" and the report of April, a new search after the definitive resting-place of

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the penal colony. This time it was the vast plateau of Cacao, the lower lands being given up altogether as incapable of European labour. On this plain of Cacao blacks were obliged to be employed in the first labours of trenching and digging the foundations for the new establishment; and a lucky discovery, that lime could be made from shell-sand, obviated the necessity there had been of sending to France for limestone. In other stations, too, free blacks were employed at the rate of 1 fr. 25 cent. a day, and food; it being found utterly impossible to employ European labour without openly avowing it was a species of legalised murder. Out of all the convicts sent in the two years and three months during which this colony had been tried, only 2550 remained in August 1854, with an average of twenty deaths a month. The result of their labours also was sent home, in the shape of a small sample of coffee, "the whole of that year's gathering;" and the weary confession, that without a grated and closed prison there was no labour, no health, and no discipline possible. Flights were frequent in the year 1854 forty-one escaped from the Silver Mountain alone, seventeen of whom were not recaptured; and in one attempted evasion there had been bloodshed and loss of life. On the whole, the penal colony of Guiana is proved a mistake-a costly, deplorable, deadly mistake. Undertaken in too irrational excess of philanthropy; carried on under the fearful odds of climate and physical impossibilities; proposed now to be converted into the worst form of bagne or hulks, Guiana has added another to the long list of penitentiary failures which impoverish a state, demoralize men, and recruit a class they are meant to abolish. Let it be remembered too-what M. Lepelletier passes over very lightly -that most of the Cayenne transports are political prisoners; that some are mere children-youths, in the first fever of life, whose crime was an exalted imagination and a strong political belief; that these, often well-born, innocent, and honourable men and lads, are sent to herd with the veritable criminal forçat, in a climate which kills off Europeans almost as rapidly as an epidemic in a city; and then we can judge, even more learly than by the statements above, what a weight of judicial rime hangs over France for its convict colony of Guiana. Add, too, the expense of this fatal experiment-valued at about 4,245,000 fr. a year-and think what a costly grave France las dug beneath the tropics for her misguided thinkers and her eriminal actors!

The punishment of death-the last in the scale of modern punishments-is comparatively of rare occurrence in France, excepting for parricide; which includes the assassination, effective or attempted, of the chef d'état, and of a priest. M. Lepelletier