THE PENAL SYSTEM 193 



neglect, as the mothers display the greatest affection for their 

 children. 



" The Andaman Penal System is the result of the constant 

 attention of the Government which created it, and is the out- 

 come of the measures of practical men, devised to meet the 

 difficulties with which they have found themselves face to face, 

 and reduced to order and rule by some of the keenest intellects 

 that have worked in India for many years past. It is no paper 

 constitution drawn up to suit any particular theories. There 

 have always been the convicts in their thousands, and there have 

 been the climate, and the necessity for treating the convicts in 

 the way best calculated to benefit them, and for so employing 

 them as to bring down their cost to the taxpayer to the lowest 

 limits compatible with climatic conditions and beneficial treat- 

 ment. Trusted agents of the Government have pondered these 

 things on the spot in the light of an ever-increasing experience, 

 and their ideas and suggestions have passed under the criticisms 

 of highly experienced administrators, and have in the end pro- 

 duced the system which is now carried out. 



" Repeatedly tinkered and patched and recast and remodelled 

 though it has been, the Andaman System is still inchoate — still 

 on itst rial as it were. It could not well be otherwise, for in 

 dealing with the criminal we are attempting to solve a mighty 

 problem as old as criminality itself, and are plunged, perforce, 

 into a controversy as contentious now as it was centuries upon 

 centuries ago. 



" From the best estimates to hand, we may take it that the 

 permanent convict strength of the Settlement may be placed at 

 about 12,000, of whom about 800 are women, and the rule is 

 that only life convicts are sent from India, and life and long-term 

 convicts from Burma. The people received, therefore, are the 

 murderers who have for some reason escaped the death penalty, 

 and the perpetrators of the more heinous offences against 

 person and property — the men of brutal violence, the highway- 

 men, the robbers, the habitual thieves, and the receivers of 

 stolen goods, the worst of the swindlers, forgers, cheats, coiners, 

 and such like — in fact the most unrestrained temperaments of a 

 continent. These considerations show the scale of the work, 

 and the nature of the task. 



N 



