This is perhaps the most daring experiment in criminology that has ever been made. The Administration claimed success for it on the ground that none of the children of such marriages have ever been convicted of an offence against the law. Nevertheless, the Government have most wisely put a stop to this revolting parody on the most sacred of human institutions, and now wife-murderers may no longer marry poisoners or infanticides with full liberty to reproduce their species and have them educated by the State, to afterwards take their place as free citizens of the colony. The next day we drove out to the College of the Marist Brothers. It is really a sort of agricultural school, in which from seventy to eighty sons of convict parents are taught the rudiments of learning and religion and the elements of agriculture. During a conversation with the Brother Superior I stumbled upon a very curious and entirely French contradiction. I had noticed that families in New Caledonia were, as a rule, much larger than in France, and I asked if these were all the boys belonging to the concessionnaires of Bourail. “Oh no!” he replied; “but, then, you see, we have no power to compel their attendance here. We can only persuade the parents to let them come.” “But,” I said, “I understood that primary education was compulsory here as it is in France.” “For the children of free people, yes,” he replied regretfully, and with a very soft touch of sarcasm, “but for these, no. The Administration has too much regard for the sanctity of parental authority.” When the boys were lined up before us in the playground I saw about seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the abolition of convict marriages. On every face and form were stamped the unmistakable brands of criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness, and general degeneration, not all on each one, but there were none without some. Later on I started them racing and wrestling, scrambling and tree-climbing for pennies. They behaved just like monkeys with a dash of tiger in them, and I came away more convinced than ever that crime is a hereditary disease which can finally be cured only by the perpetual celibacy of the criminal. Yet in Bourail it is held for a good thing and an example of official wisdom that the children of convicts and of freemen shall sit side by side in the schools and play together in the playgrounds. [Illustration: Berezowski, the Polish Anarchist who attempted to murder Napoleon III. and the Tsar Alexander II. in the Champs Elysées. All Criminals in New Caledonia are photographed in every possible hirsute disguise; and finally cropped and clean shaven. _By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd._]