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.
The present state of New Caledonia affords abundant proof of the truth of this position. It will doubtless never advance to the rank of a first-class colony. It is still and must always be a prison house beyond sea peopled mainly by convicts past or present, by those in various stages of ameliorating change, but who cannot shake off the original taint, and the general low level is maintained by constant reinforcement of those who have it full upon them. To-day the larger part of the population of the colony is based upon the criminal element, which is divided into three principal classes: First, the forçats, or convicted prisoners still in a state of servitude; second, the libérés or emancipists in semi-freedom, who emerge in due course from the first class, and, third, the relégues or those sent from France to serve a sentence of perpetual exile. There is hope in the future for the first, partially attained freedom and approaching comfortable assurance for the second, but for the last named there is nothing but black despair. Life alone remains theirs, but with not the faintest prospect of remission or release.
It is obvious that under such conditions healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical being in a colony of lepers. Free emigrants may declare it their intention, but they will not persevere in the attempt to build up new homes under such false conditions; they will not leave the mother country, or if they do, will take the earliest opportunity to return to the hard, clean, industrious life of agricultural France. We have seen that, with the larger influx of the vigorous Anglo-Saxon, the same difficulties were faced and overcome; but at what risks, what degradation and how great a waste of men and means!
New Caledonia is nevertheless an interesting study, and its present condition an object lesson in penal legislation. It is a prison planted in the tropics, to a large extent worked and governed on the same lines as the prisons in the heart of a mother country. Wrong-doers are transported to the other end of the globe to endure a penalty that might be better inflicted, more cheaply and under better supervision and control, by the strong arm of an omnipresent public opinion at home. Some remote advantages are no doubt obtained in the later stages of the terms of imprisonment, and at least society is rinsed effectively of its lees and leavings.
The principal home for the forçats in the penal stage of exile is still on the island of Nou, already mentioned and immediately opposite Noumea, the capital of the colony, which is now, after fifty years of life, a pretty white town of villas and squares, and streets of shops brightened by a luxuriant tropical vegetation. On the island of Nou a pleasant looking settlement of white houses and shady streets has been formed at the foot of a hill crowned with the imposing and extensive prison buildings. On this commanding site and at this remote point, so-called penitentiary science has planted the same sort of machine for the coercion of erring humanity as may be seen nearly everywhere else on the civilised globe. The latest experiment is being made with the oldest methods. Here are separate cells, dark cells and condemned cells, bolts and bars, iron doors and loaded revolvers. France desires to emancipate her criminals and set them on the high road to regenerated life, but they must tread the old thorny paths and suffer the same trials by the way as their predecessors elsewhere. Discipline must be maintained, and it is enforced at times by terrible means. The lash and the "cat-o'-nine-tails" are not permitted, but a most ingenious deceptive method of torture has been invented, mild enough at first sight, yet more cruel than the rack, thumb-saw or boot.
Mr. George Griffith's description of the punishment as it existed when he saw it—happily much modified soon afterward—is horrifying in the extreme. The "black cell" was absolutely isolated. Not a sound reached it, not a ray of light penetrated it, and in his day the doors were only opened once in thirty days, when the hapless inmate was extracted for an hour's exercise and the doctor's inspection. The effect of this treatment may be best realised by Mr. Griffith's own words when he was permitted to extend relief to one of the inmates.
"Out of the corner (of the cell) came something in human shape, crouching forward, rubbing its eyes and blinking at the unaccustomed light. It had been three years and a half in that horrible hole about three yards long and half as wide. I gave him a feast of sunshine and outer air by taking his place for a few minutes. After the first two or three, the minutes lengthened into hours. I had absolutely no sense of light. I was as blind as though I had been born without eyes. The blackness seemed to come down on me like some solid thing and drive my straining eyes back into my head. It was darkness that could be felt, for I felt it, and the silence was like the silence of upper space. When the double doors opened again, the rays of light seemed to strike my eyes like daggers. The criminal whose place I had taken had a record of infamy which no printable words could express, and yet I confess I pitied him as he went back into that living death of darkness and silence."
The extreme penalty of death is by no means rare in New Caledonia, and the condemned cells in the prison of the island of Nou, six in number, are sometimes simultaneously full. An execution in that far-off place of penitence reproduces the scene in Paris; the preliminaries are the same and the ceremony is identical. The same cruel uncertainty hangs over the fate of the condemned, who hears his doom only an hour or two before he is guillotined. The commandant of the island, the chaplain and the chief warden, visit him at three o'clock in the morning and convey the dread summons, c'est pour aujourdhui, the final, fatal decision he has been awaiting day after day for weeks. Then follows la toilette de la mort, the dressing for death, when the headsman "Monsieur de l'Ile Nou," pinions him and cuts away the collar of his shirt lest it should break the fall of the swiftly descending knife.
The actual performance takes place in the great courtyard, where the scaffold has been erected and the audience is ready. All the great officials of the colony are there, and a sufficient number of troops to overawe the body of convicts arranged row behind row within full view of the stage to which the principal performer ascends. He is allowed to make a short address to his comrades, kneeling and bareheaded before him. Then he is put into position upon a sloping plank, which slides into place so that his neck is pushed out through an opening and is ready for the swift-falling blade.