The best general account of the results obtained in the Andamans is found in the address to the Society of Arts by Colonel Temple, sometime chief commissioner to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andaman penal system “is the result of the constant attention of the government which created it, and is the outcome of the measures of practical men, devised to meet the difficulties with which they have found themselves face to face, and reduced to order and rule by some of the keenest intellects that have worked in India for many years past.” 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. From the best estimates at hand we may take it that the permanent convict strength of the settlement may be placed at about twelve thousand, of whom about eight hundred are women, and the rule is that only life convicts are sent from India and life and long-term convicts from Burmah. 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, in fact, the most unrestrained temperaments of a continent. These considerations show the scale of the work and the nature of the task. Any one observing the work of the English in the East may possibly be struck with the idea that the reason for the acknowledged capacity of the race for colonial enterprise and the maintenance of empire is the ability and the willingness of the average Englishman to put his hand to any kind of work that may come his way, without any special training, from framing suitable laws and regulations and creating suitable organisations to making roads and ditches, building houses and clearing land and ploughing it. Here in Port Blair, the officers entrusted with the creation and organisation had no training for the work and were without any special guidance and teaching, yet they managed, with the worst possible material to work upon, to create in little more than forty years, upon primeval forest and swamp, situated in an enervating and, until mastered, a deadly climate, a community supporting itself in regard to many of its complicated wants.