No doubt the commissioners over-estimated the necessity of remission as a means of insuring good conduct; but they were clearly in the right in recommending the principle as a certain incentive to industry. The experience, both of this and of other countries, has demonstrated that it is impossible to compel convicts to work hard by mere coercion, the attempt to do so having invariably failed, while it has produced a brutalising effect on their minds and increased their previous aversion to labour. On this ground the late Captain Maconochie many years ago recommended that the punishment to be inflicted on criminals should be measured, not by time, but by the amount of labour they should be compelled to perform before regaining their freedom; and he devised an ingenious mode of recording their daily industry by marks, for the purpose of determining when they should have a right to their discharge. Captain Maconochie himself experimented on his own suggestions in Norfolk Island, but not with any great success. The state of Norfolk Island, indeed, was never such as to encourage experiments of any kind. It was really reserved for the officials who superintended the working of transportation in Western Australia to give the system its first practically successful trial. There a convict was allowed to earn by each day's labour a number of marks, and as soon as they amounted to a total previously calculated according to his sentence, he was granted a ticket-of-leave. Industry became the test, and not good conduct; the latter was only recognised by making misconduct carry with it a forfeiture of some of the marks already earned by industry. The convict's early release was no longer a matter of certainty provided only that he avoided certain acts of rebellion, but it was made contingent on something he had to earn. His fate rested in his own hands; it was not to depend upon an opinion of his character formed by others. The success which was shown to have attended the adoption of this principle in Western Australia has been equally apparent in Great Britain. The mark system is the keystone, the mainspring of the latest British method of dealing with convicts, and the valuable results which have grown out of it, as now clearly apparent, will be set forth presently in the final chapter of this volume. CHAPTER XI FRENCH PENAL COLONIES