The Mother Country is so indifferent to our aspirations and our needs, that she has never given herself the trouble to recognise the gravity of this special cause of complaint. At least 300 cases of escape from New Caledonia to Australian shores are known and recorded. In the case of the ‘exiles’ we naturally rejoice. We have given home and a glad welcome to that distinguished artist, M. Henri, who was banished from his native France for his political opinions, and who has now achieved for himself a perfectly unique position in Australian art. There is, assuredly, not one man in the Australian Continent who would willingly have put an obstacle in the way of escape of M. Henri Rochefort. It is not men of this type to whose presence in our neighbourhood we object. But it is undeniable that the French criminals who now people New Caledonia, are men of the most abominable of all conceivable types. The grievance—the true grievance—is not merely that the French Government should have been allowed to defile our neighbourhood by the deportation of these people, but that they should positively have determined to perpetuate the race. How many people in England are aware of the shameful and stupid fact that the French Government, having massed its most awful male outcasts in New Caledonia, deliberately sent out to them female convicts of the most abandoned type in order that the men might marry and reproduce their own likeness? The mere incidental question of bigamy by government authority need scarcely be considered. Amongst the women sent out were parricides, simple murdresses, and creatures soiled by all the crimes of which nature is capable. One of the brides had murdered both her father and her mother, and another, on the outward voyage, threw her own baby out of a port-hole. The sires of the future French settlement were, of course, worthy of their partners, and one may fairly ask what could possibly be expected of a race so founded. I have myself spoken with Englishmen upon this question, and have been met with a laugh, a shrug of the shoulders, and an allusion to an ancient proverb about a pot and kettle. It is undeniable that Hobart Town and Botany Bay welcomed in their time a great deal of human evil, but it never came unalloyed, and an examination of facts will teach any inquirer that a good fifty per cent. of the so-called crimes for which men and women were expatriated, were no more than the ebullitions of an impatient patriotism, or the escapades of unguided youth. Leaving that aside, nobody pretends that the Australian population of three and a half millions is seriously tainted. We are troubled by certain forms of rowdyism and brutality, and we have a dangerous class rooted amongst us. That a great law-abiding population should be handicapped in that way by the past action of the Mother Country was hard enough to bear in all conscience, but that England should have sat supine whilst a foreign power doubled, trebled,