"It does not require much imagination to contrast the difference in the personality of the same human being as he reaches and leaves Port Blair. He that arrived an outcast, void of restraint, and unfit for association with his kind on equal terms, goes forth a useful citizen, broken to restraint, and not only fitted for human society, but well used to submit to the conventions by which alone that society can be maintained. And men so reformed are not sent back to India by ones and twos, but by scores every year. Every one of the life convicts sent home is such a man. The incorrigible are kept till death, and the slow to learn are kept until they mend their ways, while those only that have good in them, and are capable of reform, are returned to the society they once disgraced.
"The difference between transportation to Port Blair and imprisonment in a jail lies in this very matter. While the Port Blair returned convict is a man fitted to, and habituated to, support himself, the prisoner released from a jail is not only a pauper but has became pauperised. That is, he has become unaccustomed to find for himself, and this disability has grown upon him with the length of his imprisonment. On this important ground alone, one cannot help hoping that some day it may be found feasible to extend the Andaman System to long-term prisoners from India.
"Besides the direct personal education that the Port Blair convict receives, he is taught various lessons of general importance in indirect ways. There is the value of justice, for instance. For though his life is absolutely controlled by executive officers, everything that happens to him is the result of a quasi-judicial procedure. No punishment can be inflicted without a proceeding, without registration, or without record of the evidence on which it is awarded. There is a regular course of appeal, and a further untrammelled appeal to the Head of the Administration himself. Thus, though the punishments in such a place as Port Blair must on occasion assume a form of deterrent severity, there is as much security of justice in award as elsewhere.
"Then there is the system of local marriage. This is no concubinage, no temporary or irregular alliance. Every inquiry is made and every step is taken that is necessary to render convict marriages legal, according to the customary personal law of the contracting parties. Long is the waiting in many cases between proposal and completion, and many are the disappointments when the conditions are found to bar completion. Once married, the husband and wife are made to clearly realise their condition, and must depart together or not at all.
"The children, of course, are a very serious question, but the best is done for them,—their health is so well cared for, that in Port Blair, probably alone in all the East, it is the rule to successfully rear the whole of a young family; primary education is here compulsory, again probably alone in all the East; and technical training is free to all. Their inheritance of temperament and their early associations are the points of anxiety regarding them, but these matters may be fairly said to be beyond control.[106]
"The Savings Bank has already been mentioned as a factor in the education of the convict. How great has been the effect of this beneficent institution will be seen from the fact that it was started twenty-seven years ago with 54 accounts, and is now, and has for years past been, the largest local bank of the kind in India. It has now over 2300 open convict accounts, and has had 12,000 accounts opened during its existence. This means, that for years, more than one fourth of the whole body of the convicts have kept their savings in it, thus showing how well they have taken to heart the lessons of thrift and of faith in the honesty of the Government.
"But far be it from concealing the fact that there is a seamy side to life in Port Blair. It could not be otherwise; and it would be easy enough to paint a lurid picture of its inhabitants,—easy enough to preach a scathing condemnation of the envy, hatred, and malice, the uncharitableness, the evil-speaking, lying and slandering, the murder and the cruel death, of the amazing immorality, the callous depravity, the downright unabashed wickedness, that are so constantly forced upon the view. But such is not to the purpose. Human faults are easily seen and easily denounced, for such things lie on the surface. The difficult thing always is to perceive aright the good that there is in bad men, and bring that out, and that is the object that the Government is aiming at in the system just explained.
"Any one observing the work of the English in the East may possibly be struck with the idea that the reason for the acknowledged capacity of the race for colonial enterprise and the maintenance of empire is the ability and the willingness of the average Englishman to put his hand to any kind of work that may come his way, without any special training, from framing suitable laws and regulations and creating suitable organisations to making roads and ditches, building houses, and clearing land and ploughing it. Here in Port Blair, the officers entrusted with the creation, organisation, and maintenance of the Penal Settlement, have, without any special training for the work, and without any special guidance and teaching, managed with the worst possible material to work upon—life and long-term convicts from every part of India and Burma—to create in little more than forty years, upon primeval forest and swamp, situated in an enervating, and until mastered, a deadly climate, a community supporting itself in regard to many of its complicated wants.
"They began with the dense forests, the fetid swamps, and the pestilential coral banks of tropical islands, and have made out of them many square miles of grass and arable lands, supporting over fifty villages besides convict stations. Miles upon miles of swamp have been reclaimed, the coral banks have been controlled, and a place with regard to which the words climate and pestilence were almost synonymous has been turned into one favourably spoken of as to its healthiness. The Settlement now grows its own vegetables, tea,[107] coffee, cocoa, tapioca, and arrowroot; some of its ordinary food grains, and most of its fodder. It supplies itself with the greater part of its animal food, and all its fuel and salt. In other lines of work, it makes its own boats, and provides from its own resources the bulk of the materials for its buildings, which are constructed and erected locally. Amongst the materials produced are all the timber, stone, bricks, lime, and mortar, and most of the iron and metal work are made up there from raw material. In the matter of convict clothing, all that is necessary to be purchased elsewhere are the roughest of cotton hanks and wool in the first and rawest condition, every other operation being performed on the spot. It provides much of its own leather.
"In achieving the results, the officers have had first to learn for themselves as best they could how to turn out the work to hand, and then to teach what they had learnt to the most unpromising pupils that can be imagined,—only about 3 per cent. of the convicts sent there having been previously employed on the work required of them in Port Blair. And they have been hampered all along by the necessities of convict discipline, by the constant release of their men, and their punishment for misconduct. It is under such conditions that the Corps of Artificers and the other convicts have had to be utilised. Nevertheless, the roads and drains, the buildings and boats, the embankments and reservoirs, are as good and durable as are the same class of structures elsewhere. The manufactures are sufficient for their purpose, and there are among the taught those who are now skilled in the use of many kinds of machinery. Cultivation is generally fair, and some of it very good. The general sanitation—but here there are peculiar advantages—is literally second to none."[108]