New Caledonia, while not without its natural advantages, such as a nearly perfect climate, freedom from reptiles and animal life inimical to man, is not very richly endowed except in unprospected and undeveloped mineral wealth. The island consists of a rugged backbone of mountains clothed with dense forests and grooved with rushing torrents, along whose banks lie the only cultivable ground. A thin and sandy soil covers a substratum of hard rock, which makes but scanty return for the labour bestowed and serves best for pasturage. Hence the convict farms already referred to have never been profitably worked. Those especially of Bourail and Koe, the largest and most ambitious, show a positive loss. At the former only three and a half tons of sugar were turned out in one year by four hundred men, and ten years of toil had brought only fifty hectares of land into cultivation. At Koe, five years' receipts were valued at 50,000 francs, and the expenses for the same period just trebled that sum. In 1883 the minister of marine approved the suppression of the penitentiary farms on the island of Nou and at Canala, and the limitation of the sugar cane cultivation at Bourail, on the ground that the returns were altogether inadequate to the outlay. It was only too evident, as the outcome of early years, that efforts had been misdirected, and that the labour had been wasted and frittered away instead of being more usefully employed for the benefit of the whole colony. One signal instance of the shortcomings of the colonial administrators is shown by their neglect to develop the means of internal communication. It was not until 1883, that is to say, after nearly twenty years of colonial life, that road-making, that indispensable preliminary to development, was undertaken on any extensive scale. New Caledonia, an island 230 miles long and 50 miles broad, owned only 57 kilometres of road before the year 1882. It was Captain Pallu de la Barriere, a governor whose administration was severely criticised on account of his excessive humanitarianism, but whose views as regards the utilisation of convict labour were far-seeing, who removed this reproach. His idea was to substitute what he called movable camps for the _bagnes sedentaires_ or permanent penitentiaries. He thought that the severest toil should be the lot of all convicts, at least at first; and this, he conceived, could be best compassed by employing them in road-making, thus benefiting the colony while effectively punishing the convict. His whole scheme of organisation reads like a page from the despatches of British colonial governors some thirty years previous. The measures he proposed, his plans for housing the convicts and providing for their safe custody, were almost identical with those in force with the road-gangs of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. He was very hopeful; he had no fear of escapes or of aggravated misconduct scattered over the wide area