That is one of the reasons why France will never make a real living colony out of New Caledonia until its present criminal and semi-criminal population has utterly died out—a contingency which is not likely to come to pass while French rule in the Pacific endures. The Frenchman cannot colonise, although, curiously enough, under another flag he can become a most excellent colonist. Take him away from France and plant him, as in New Caledonia, under the tricolour and under the care of his all too paternal, perhaps it would be more correct to say maternal government, and, whether bond or free, he begins to get homesick, and a homesick man is the last person on earth to begin colony-making. Of course, if you take him out in a convict transport and plant him on an island as a prisoner you can make a colonist of a sort out of him, and that is the sort you find in New Caledonia, a human machine whose initiative, if he ever had any, has been ground out of him, not so much by prison discipline, for that, as I shall show, is indulgent to a degree that would be quite incomprehensible in England; but, rather, by a rigid system of supervision which permits him to do nothing for himself, which provides everything for him from the plough with which he breaks the virgin soil of his concession to the prize which he gets for a well-raised crop. Such a man walks on crutches all his life, and a colonist on crutches is an entirely hopeless, if not a quite impossible, person. An experience of something over forty years has convinced all the most intelligent students of the question, that the convict civilisation of New Caledonia is a dream the realisation of which is made impossible by the conditions of the system itself. During my last conversation with the Director of the Penal Administration, he asked me what I thought of the social conditions of the island, and the possibility of sometime transforming it from a penal settlement into a free colony? He was intensely in earnest on the subject. He believed, or at least he did his best to believe, in the future of that beautiful native land of his, and I would have encouraged him in his loyal belief if I could have done so; but I had seen too much of real colonisation in many lands to be able to do that honestly, and so what I told him was this: “Noumea is the heart of New Caledonia, as Paris is the heart of France. The greater part of it is founded upon what was once a miasmatic swamp, and, no matter what you do, the poison-germs will find their way to the surface, and pollute the atmosphere that you breathe. That is a concrete likeness of your society. It is based on a substratum of crime. For forty years the poison-germs of the mental disease which is called crime have been rising from your lowest social stratum and permeating all the others.” [Illustration: A Lake in the interior of New Caledonia.]