THE PENAL SYSTEM 195 



he is told ; he may move about beyond his village and his fields 

 by permission only ; he cannot leave the Settlement ; he may 

 not be idle, under pain of a forced return to convict labour. In 

 this state he remains ten or fifteen years, according to the crimes 

 that have sent him here, until the happy day comes when the 

 order for absolute release is placed in his hands and he goes free 

 as other men. 



"As in the other portions of his life in transportation, even in 

 the condition of self-supporter the convict passes through two 

 distinct stages. In the first stage he is assisted at the beginning 

 with house, food, and tools, and then by exemption from rent, 

 taxes, fees, and other cesses payable by the free towards the 

 common benefit. In the second stage he receives no assistance 

 whatever, but finds the whole of his means of livelihood, and is 

 charged with every public payment which would be exacted 

 from him in his own country. 



" The women are dealt with on the same lines, but more gently, 

 as becomes the gentler sex. For the first three years the convict 

 woman works in the Female Jail as a mere slave, fed, housed, 

 clothed, and cared for. Then for two years she is treated to the 

 same easing down of severity as is granted to the men, and after 

 a total of five years she is eligible for marriage and domestic 

 service. Assuming that she marries, she joins her husband in 

 his village, where she leads the ordinary life of an Indian woman, 

 but subject to the same disabilities as her husband until she has 

 completed fifteen years in transportation, when she may go free 

 with him whithersoever he may go. 



" Now through all this long education to useful citizenship there 

 run continuous threads of practice in self-help and self-restraint, 

 and of inducement to profit by the practice. The length of the 

 convict's stay in the Cellular Jail depends entirely on his conduct 

 in it, and so it remains throughout his career, up to the point of 

 self-support. Efforts to behave well, and submission to control, 

 mean promotion upwards from grade to grade in due course. 

 Every serious lapse means the retarding of promotion, or actual 

 retrogression. And when he has obtained his ticket-of-leave, it is 

 to his own effort, his own thrift, his own steadiness, that he has 

 solely to look for that little hoard which is to be so much to him 

 when he goes back to his native land— no pauper, no mere jail-bird, 

 no unwelcome burden on his relatives, but a self-respecting citizen, 



