The convicts employed in the Tirgu-Ocna and Ocnele-Mari mines are paid from sixpence to eightpence a day for their work, and, save that liberty and the hospitality of the local taverns are denied them, their condition is little worse than that of the free labourers. As capital punishment does not obtain in Rumania, the convict miners include murderers, brigands, and the worst class of criminals, and armed soldiers escort them to and fro between the prison and the mine, and remain on guard while they are at work. Dashes for liberty used to be common, and organized attempts to escape have also been attempted, but now, on the first sign of suspicious behaviour on the part of the convicts, the order is given for the whole gang to throw themselves flat upon the ground. As those who disobey the order are immediately shot, instantaneous compliance with the command is usually observed. On one occasion a body of disaffected convicts had recourse to a form of passive resistance, and when the day’s work was over they refused to leave the mine. The guards and overseers thereupon withdrew and left the mutineers to reflect in an intolerably salt atmosphere upon the virtues of fresh water, of which they had no supply. After two days of torture, the men capitulated. But the work of superintending the convicts in the mines is a delicate and dangerous task. The overseers are compelled to mix with the men, and it is but the work of a few silent minutes for a gang to overpower an unpopular official and squeeze the breath out of his body. As the murder is a communal affair, and the practice of making an example of one man _pour l’encourager les autres_ is not adopted in Rumania, the extent of punishment inflicted upon the whole gang is less than would be meted out to individual offenders. As the salt reserves in the three principal mines of Rumania are estimated at 8,774,000,000 tons, and the annual extraction has never exceeded 150,000 tons, it follows that, at the present rate of progress, the deposits cannot be exhausted for several millenniums. Where the salt deposits are composed of a mineral that is white, odourless, and practically pure, as in the Wieliezka system and the mines of Rumania, and particularly if labour is abundant and cheap, and the industry is a monopoly of the State, rock-salt mining will always hold its own. [Illustration: WIELIEZKA SALT MINES, GALICIA. THE RAILWAY STATION ON THE THIRD LEVEL]