"Repeatedly tinkered and patched and recast and remodelled though it has been, the Andaman System is still inchoate--still on its trial as it were. It could not well be otherwise, for in dealing with the criminal we are attempting to solve a mighty problem as old as criminality itself, and are plunged, perforce, into a controversy as contentious now as it was centuries upon centuries ago. "From the best estimates to hand, we may take it that the permanent convict strength of the Settlement may be placed at about 12,000, of whom about 800 are women, and the rule is that only life convicts are sent from India, and life and long-term convicts from Burma. The people received, therefore, are the murderers who have for some reason escaped the death penalty, and the perpetrators of the more heinous offences against person and property--the men of brutal violence, the highwaymen, the robbers, the habitual thieves, and the receivers of stolen goods, the worst of the swindlers, forgers, cheats, coiners, and such like--in fact the most unrestrained temperaments of a continent. These considerations show the scale of the work, and the nature of the task. "The convict comes to the Andamans a creature who, by his life or his acts, has shown himself to be so unfitted for human society that he has been cast out of it for life, or for a long term of years. Received thus, he is first subjected for six months to a most severe discipline--hard, rigid, uncompromising. He is taught what it is like to be forced to bend his uncontrolled nature to the iron yoke of a _régime_, not of hard toil, but of soul-crushing monotony. From the stern Cellular Jail he is next transferred to one of the associated jails, to the comparative blessing of hard labour, in company with others, but still under a strict discipline. He works and feeds with others in gangs, and there is a certain variety in the tasks demanded, but he still sleeps in his separate cell. Here he stays for a year and a half, and then for the next three years he is a slave, as the word is ordinarily understood, locked up with other slaves in barracks at night, but working in the open at any kind of task that the needs of the Settlement may require of him, according to his capacity--an unpaid, unrewarded labourer, but well fed, housed, clothed, and cared for, and always under watch and guard. During the following five years he is still a labouring convict, but the severity of his life is eased down a little for him. He is now eligible for the petty posts of supervision, and for the less irksome and less slave-like forms of labour, and he gets a little--a very little--allowance, to buy a few small luxuries, or to place in the Savings Bank against future necessities. Having thus served ten