The efforts of France to found penal colonies range far back into history. They date from a period long antecedent to the latest craze for colonial aggrandisement. The very first attempt to sow the seeds of a prosperous community with the failures of society was in 1763, when the colonisation of French Guiana, already often attempted without success, was again tried on an ambitious scale. The project failed miserably. An expedition fourteen thousand strong, recruited mainly from the scum and sweepings of the streets of Paris, melted away within a year, and starvation carried off all whom the deadly climate spared. A second similar experiment was tried in 1766, with a like disastrous result. No serious importance could be attached to the colonising efforts of the victims exiled to Guiana by the revolutionary tribunals. Barely half the number survived the voyage, and the balance were in no condition to act as pioneers. The records of French Guiana are full of such fiascos, the most unsuccessful of which was the philanthropic attempt of the Baron Milius, in 1823, to establish a penal colony on the banks of the Mana, by the marriage and expatriation of habitual criminals, _recidivistes_, and degraded women,--a most ill-judged undertaking, speedily productive of ghastly horrors. After this, penal colonisation seems to have fallen into disfavour with France. Not only was it not renewed, but the principle of criminal deportation, of exile as a penalty, was formally condemned in 1847, both by such eminent publicists as MM. Lucas, De Beaumont and De Tocqueville, and by the government of the hour. Yet within a few years the practice was suddenly restored. To the new men in power there was probably something attractive in the theory of transportation, as may be seen from the high-sounding phrases that accompanied their decrees. The idea was not merely to banish the dangerous social elements to a distant soil: the young republic wished to prove that "humanity presided over all its actions." Deportation, with the disciplinary processes that surrounded it, was expected to bring about the moral regeneration of those subjected to it; the criminal would be transformed into a useful citizen; no longer a terror in his old home, he would aid the development of and become a positive benefactor to the new. The government was, indeed, so fascinated by the prospective advantages of transportation to the convicts themselves, that it expected them to accept it as a boon. Registers were opened at all the _bagnes_, or seaport convict-stations, on which prisoners might inscribe their names as volunteers for the high favour of removal to the promised land beyond the seas. The philanthropic wish to benefit the exile was not, however, the sole object of the government, as may be seen in various articles in the decrees. The hope of founding substantial colonial possessions was not disguised. The convict might benefit by expatriation, but so would