In Australia the matter was different. In the bad, old days men and women were shipped over seas for offences which would not earn fourteen days’ hard labour now, and the majority of them were morally and physically sound. Moreover, they were Anglo-Saxons. They knew how to tackle the wilderness and subdue it, and when they won their freedom they mixed freely with freemen, and, in due course, the wilderness got subdued, and the new nations got started. That was because there was a maximum of individual initiative, and a minimum of government control which made it possible for the man to work out his own moral and social redemption, and at the same time to shape a country for his children to dwell in. When I first went to Australia as a lad in the deck-house of a limejuicer, the letters M.L.A. didn’t only mean Member of the Legislative Assembly. Sometimes they meant Mustn’t Leave Australia; but to-day the penal settlements of fifty years ago are federated nations. Caledonia is still a convict settlement, and such it must remain until the last drop of convict blood within its confines solidifies in the veins of its last dead criminal, or until its moral and social swamp is drained and purified by more drastic measures than its present rulers appear to have dreamt of.
For the last decade or so the French Government has been doing its best to induce French peasants, artisans, and small tradesmen and manufacturers to go out to New Caledonia as agricultural and industrial colonists. It has given them free passages, land for nothing, free mining concessions, and even capital to start on, but, in spite all of these advantages and, perhaps, partly because of them, free colonisation has not been a success in New Caledonia. The causes of this failure are not very far to seek, and some of them are exactly the same as those which operate against the success of German colonies.
The first of them is the Functionary. New Caledonia is perhaps the most over-governed place in the whole world. The Australian colonies are beginning to suffer from over-government, the natural result of a too triumphant democracy, but there, as elsewhere under the British flag, it is still possible for the pioneer to fight his own battle for home and fortune against the Spirit of the Wilderness with no more governmental interference than is necessary to enforce obedience to the law. It doesn’t matter of what nationality he is, he succeeds or fails by his own strength or weakness.
In a later chapter I shall describe the most marvellously successful piece of cosmopolitan colonisation that has ever been accomplished, an experiment, the success of which completely bears out all that I am reluctantly obliged to say here against the French system.
From the moment that the Frenchman, whether peasant or artisan, leaves his native land to become a colonist in an oversea French possession he has a functionary in front of him, one on each hand, and one behind him. This is to ensure that he shall go along the dead straight line which governmental wisdom has drawn for him. The man in front prevents him going too fast, and the one behind sees that his footsteps to fortune do not fall behind the regulation pace. When he lands in the colony, his first task is to master more or less imperfectly the vast mass of regulations by which all his comings and goings are ordered. Within the sphere of action allotted to him everything is already cut and dried. To be original is to transgress the code and to trample on the official corns of a functionary. Wherefore, he very soon finds that originality is at a heavy discount, and a colonist without originality is of about as much use in a new country as a baby in long clothes. In fact the baby is a more valuable citizen, for he may grow into something which the officially conducted colonist never will.
Then there is that fatal convict question. In the following pages I have shown that in New Caledonia there are three classes into which the criminal population of New Caledonia is rigidly divided. First, there is the forçat, or convict proper, the man who has been sentenced to a definite term of transportation, ranging from eight years to life. The second class is composed of relégués who have been banished to New Caledonia for life, not for any particular crime, but because, by an accumulation of offences, they have proved themselves to be hopeless criminals, and therefore unfit for civilised society and incapable of bearing the burden of responsibility which is inseparable from freedom. The third class is composed of the libérés. We have no counterpart to the libéré in our criminal system. The nearest English analogue to him is the convict released on license, but the only real likeness between them is the fact that they are both responsible for their movements to the police.
In New Caledonia the forçat may become a concessionaire and after that a libéré, or he may become first a collective and then an individual libéré. In the former case he is free to hire himself out for work during the day, but he must return to sleep in barracks. In the latter he is absolutely free within the limits of the colony. Subject to the sanction of the Administration he may engage in any business he pleases.
Many men in this class have done exceedingly well for themselves. Others again have returned to France, of course under government sanction, to present their petition for “rehabilitation.” If this is granted they become freemen, their civil rights are restored to them, and they can either settle down in France or return to the colony. As a rule they choose the latter alternative. The keeper of the canteen where I lived at Prony had done this, and had won his way back not only to citizenship, but to universal respect.
The relégué has no such hope. He is banished for life and remains a well-cared-for slave of the government for the rest of his days. In some rare cases he may regain his freedom as a special act of grace, but his civil rights are never restored to him.
These three classes form the real substrata upon which the whole social and official fabric of New Caledonian society rests, and it is into such a soil, supersaturated with crime, that the French Government proposes to transplant freemen and women, and make colonists of them. In other words the free emigrant to New Caledonia must take his wife and children across thirteen thousand miles of ocean and make a home for them in a land where they will inhale the poison-germs of villainy with every breath they breathe. Their servants and their labourers, if they can afford them, will be thieves, swindlers, and assassins. Their sons and daughters will have to work with them, grow up with their children, sit beside them at school, and perhaps some day intermarry with them, for all children of convicts born in New Caledonia are free before the law, and the legal equals of all other children. It is obvious that under such conditions, healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical life in a colony of lepers.