After the experience of a quarter of a century, it may be most unhesitatingly asserted that the net result of the deportation to Saghalien has been most disappointing. Failure has met the Russian government on every side. Transportation has fulfilled none of the aims of penal legislation, has been neither reformatory nor deterrent, but merely painful and punitive without any return in benefit to the colony. The island has made no progress; its scanty natural resources have been little utilised, and no return has been obtained from the cultivation of the indifferent soil. At the best period, barely one-tenth of the convicts qualifying for conditional freedom, and labouring to become proprietors of farms with lands cleared and stocked with cattle, were of any value in carrying on the work; of the remaining nine-tenths, half had no heart in it, and the other half were frankly idlers and vagabonds hanging about the settlements, looking for free rations, and when the issue ceased, ranging the country as masterless men depending on theft and depredation for their bare living. The social atmosphere was vitiated, and noxious evil elements predominated; general depravity had become almost universal. It was the old story of Australian transportation, and the later experience of New Caledonia. Once more, penal exile stands condemned as a secondary punishment, showing the same absence of any redeeming or compensating features in the improvement of these new lands or the amelioration of the individual. The system must be still more barren of results in the future, now that the southern half of the island—the part most favourable to agriculture—has been surrendered to Japan as part of the last war indemnity. This will seriously diminish the amount of land available for the “exile settlers,” as they are called. The efforts made to colonise have been feeble and fruitless. Convict labourers were set to clear the forests and reclaim waste lands, but in a desultory, half-hearted fashion, without skill or knowledge, and wielding primitive instruments and imperfect tools. Much time was wasted in covering long distances to draw rations, and depending upon the administration for advances to provide seed and stock, both inadequate in quantity and of very inferior quality. As a general rule, the settlers were physically unfit for the work in hand; their health was not robust; they soon aged and broke down under the rough conditions of daily life. All were crushed with indebtedness to the government for advances, and also to private usurers who supplied means for self-indulgence. A fierce passion for gambling consumed them, and drunkenness was universal. Vodka was smuggled in freely from Japan, and numbers of illicit stills manufactured it secretly upon the island. One of the principal officials spoke as follows of the deplorable state of things:—