Many men in this class have done exceedingly well for themselves. Others again have returned to France, of course under government sanction, to present their petition for “rehabilitation.” If this is granted they become freemen, their civil rights are restored to them, and they can either settle down in France or return to the colony. As a rule they choose the latter alternative. The keeper of the canteen where I lived at Prony had done this, and had won his way back not only to citizenship, but to universal respect. The _relégué_ has no such hope. He is banished for life and remains a well-cared-for slave of the government for the rest of his days. In some rare cases he may regain his freedom as a special act of grace, but his civil rights are never restored to him. These three classes form the real substrata upon which the whole social and official fabric of New Caledonian society rests, and it is into such a soil, supersaturated with crime, that the French Government proposes to transplant freemen and women, and make colonists of them. In other words the free emigrant to New Caledonia must take his wife and children across thirteen thousand miles of ocean and make a home for them in a land where they will inhale the poison-germs of villainy with every breath they breathe. Their servants and their labourers, if they can afford them, will be thieves, swindlers, and assassins. Their sons and daughters will have to work with them, grow up with their children, sit beside them at school, and perhaps some day intermarry with them, for all children of convicts born in New Caledonia are free before the law, and the legal equals of all other children. It is obvious that under such conditions, healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical life in a colony of lepers. Many have tried the experiment and have gone back to France richer in experience and poorer in pocket, and with such tales in their mouths as have justly persuaded their fellow-peasants and artisans that their hard, clean, thrifty life in France is infinitely better than State-aided contamination in New Caledonia.