which he now proposed to people with convict gangs. His intentions were no doubt excellent, but in the twenty years following the initiation of his scheme they have borne no very substantial fruit. The colonial administration has found even less satisfaction in the emancipists than in the convicts still under restraint. The former are a great and increasing body, for whom work cannot easily be found. The hope that the labour markets of the colony would absorb a great proportion soon proved illusory. For some time past the free colonists, by no means a numerous class, have declined to employ emancipists, declaring that while they claimed the free man's wages they would not give the free man's work. The settlers preferred to import native labour from the neighbouring islands, especially the New Hebrides, thus coming into direct conflict with the authorities, who soon put their veto on such importation. The settlers were told that if they wanted hands they must seek them among the emancipists, and all protests were silenced by reminding the colonists that New Caledonia was a penal settlement and that if they lived there they must abide by its constitution. At this time there were some four or five thousand emancipists living as free charges, lodged, fed and clothed at the cost of the state, yet making absolutely no return. The greater number of these were kept in a military camp under some semblance of discipline, but undergoing little restraint beyond the prohibition to wander abroad, and within the limits of the camp the occupants could do as they pleased. Later and more specific information is now at hand in the accounts brought back by an enterprising traveller, Mr. George Griffith, who visited New Caledonia in 1900. The penal colonisation undertaken by France with such philanthropic motives, and so sedulously carried out, has resulted in failure. The experience is the same as that of New South Wales and Tasmania; the penalty of banishment and penal exile inflicted upon the majority of convicts has been accomplished, but not the regeneration, to any appreciable extent, of the criminal classes. Their conversion into a prosperous community, self-reliant, self-supporting and able to stand alone, is still a vague, unrealised dream. All the conditions that favoured the growth of its great neighbour have been absent in New Caledonia, and it was hampered also by special disadvantages. There has been none of the steady influx of free settlers such as immigrated to Australia when first difficulties were removed, nor yet the amazing stimulus of the discovery of gold as on the near-by continent. Peculiar racial disadvantages have further impeded development.