"Besides the direct personal education that the Port Blair convict receives, he is taught various lessons of general importance in indirect ways. There is the value of justice, for instance. For though his life is absolutely controlled by executive officers, everything that happens to him is the result of a quasi-judicial procedure. No punishment can be inflicted without a proceeding, without registration, or without record of the evidence on which it is awarded. There is a regular course of appeal, and a further untrammelled appeal to the Head of the Administration himself. Thus, though the punishments in such a place as Port Blair must on occasion assume a form of deterrent severity, there is as much security of justice in award as elsewhere. "Then there is the system of local marriage. This is no concubinage, no temporary or irregular alliance. Every inquiry is made and every step is taken that is necessary to render convict marriages legal, according to the customary personal law of the contracting parties. Long is the waiting in many cases between proposal and completion, and many are the disappointments when the conditions are found to bar completion. Once married, the husband and wife are made to clearly realise their condition, and must depart together or not at all. "The children, of course, are a very serious question, but the best is done for them,--their health is so well cared for, that in Port Blair, probably alone in all the East, it is the rule to successfully rear the whole of a young family; primary education is here compulsory, again probably alone in all the East; and technical training is free to all. Their inheritance of temperament and their early associations are the points of anxiety regarding them, but these matters may be fairly said to be beyond control.[106] "The Savings Bank has already been mentioned as a factor in the education of the convict. How great has been the effect of this beneficent institution will be seen from the fact that it was started twenty-seven years ago with 54 accounts, and is now, and has for years past been, the largest local bank of the kind in India. It has now over 2300 open convict accounts, and has had 12,000 accounts opened during its existence. This means, that for years, more than one fourth of the whole body of the convicts have kept their savings in it, thus showing how well they have taken to heart the lessons of thrift and of faith in the honesty of the Government.