Penal exile in favour with other nations--Systems of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal--Earliest French ventures--Guiana a fiasco--High sounding names--Renewed attempt--Settlement made in New Caledonia in 1864--Capital at Noumea--Convict population increases--Noumea in 1888--Results of convict labour meagre--Loose discipline and low moral tone--Agricultural settlements--Life at the smaller stations--Arab convicts--Enforced labour unremunerative--Delay in development--The emancipists--Same warfare with free settlers as in Australia--A later view--Visited by Mr. George Griffith in 1900--Free immigrants refuse to remain--Present condition proof of failure of penal exile. The vast and costly efforts of Great Britain to make use of exile as the penalty for crime, and the strange, unlooked for results achieved, have been set forth. These efforts were undoubtedly successful, although not in the manner expected. To add a great colony to the British Empire was no small feat, even though the sources were impure and the foundations laid by the dregs of society. But the gain was some compensation for the means adopted. In any case, the convict stigma has long since been washed out by honest industry and reputable development. A vast territory, richly endowed, offered special advantages to an enterprising people with the genius of colonisation. Other nations, who overlooked the difficulties faced and overcome by England, have endeavoured to follow in her footsteps, and have made but little progress. France, as we shall see, has gone to great lengths in the practice of deportation, but to no purpose. Portugal still transports her criminals to the African colony of Angola, where the system is established on a small scale and has exhibited no glaring defects. Italy has long favoured the formation of criminal colonies on the many islands that surround her coast, and has removed numbers of prisoners to agricultural stations at Sardinia, to Pianosa and Gorgona in the Tuscan Archipelago, as well as to Monte Cristo and Capraja. Spain had a penal settlement at Ceuta on the north African shore as far back as the fifteenth century, and has more recently added large stations at Melilla and Alhucemas. Spanish experience in convict colonies is said to be satisfactory, but the conditions are much the same as in Australia,--no better, if no worse.