experience what their lives were. Buffon, indeed, who thought that in the human species the greatest number of individuals are devoted to pain from the moment of their existence,' thought also that perhaps some animals were 'created for misery,' and he instanced the sloth as one of these devoted animals. It was a fortunate instance! The habits of the sloth were not then known, and he had been observed only when grovelling on the earth; there was every reason to regard him as a natural mistake, an animal who had missed his proper element, and presented a perfect example of misery. Waterton was a genuine naturalist; he sought out the sloth in his native forests, picked him up from the ground, placed him on the branch of a tree, and saw him at once on his way to pleasure.' And à propos of Buffon's remark, Waterton afterwards records in his Wanderings: 'I cannot conceive that any of them were created for misery. That thousands live in misery there can be no doubt, but then misery has overtaken them in their path through life, and whenever man has come up with them I should suppose they have seldom escaped from experiencing a certain proportion of misery.'

Paley, who in the pre-scientific era may perhaps be allowed to rank as a naturalist, bases one of the principal arguments of his Natural Theology on animal happiness. The proof of the Divine goodness he rests on two propositions: first, that most contrivances in nature are designed with obvious beneficence; and, secondly, that the Creator has added pleasure to animal sensations gratuitously— that is, when, as Paley conceives, the same purpose might just as well have been accomplished painfully.

"Nor is the design abortive. It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view' (Natural Theology). Paley goes on to quote as instances the motions of insects on the wing testifying 'their joy and the exultation which they feel in their lately discovered faculties,' the movements of fish in the water, 'their attitudes, their vivacity, their leaps out of the water, their frolics in it (which I have noticed a thousand times with equal attention and amusement), all conduce to show their excess of spirits.' 'Walking by the sea-side in a calm evening, upon a sandy shore, and with an ebbing tide, I have frequently remarked the appearance of a dark cloud, or rather very thick mist, hanging over the edge of the water, to the height perhaps of half a yard, and of the breadth of two or three yards, stretching along the coast as far as the eye could reach, and always retiring with the water. When this cloud came to be examined, it proved to be nothing else than so much space filled with young shrimps in the act of bounding in the air from the shallow margin of the water or from the wet sand. If any motion of a mute animal could express delight, it was this; if they had

meant to make signs of their happiness, they could not have done so more intelligibly.' Paley would not have hesitated to reverse this argument and, instead of inferring from the happiness of animals the beneficence of the Being whose fiat called them into existence, he would, from the basis of a divinely benevolent government of the universe, have proceeded to infer the essential happiness of its creatures. It is difficult to see how anyone who occupies Paley's standpoint can avoid drawing this latter inference. If there be any who are prepared to say they believe in animal misery and, at the same time, in an all-powerful and beneficent Ruler, it is for them to show how their two faiths can be reconciled, for to the present writer they appear absolutely inconsistent. If it were true that misery and suffering are the ordained lot of the animal world, what should be said of the author and maintainer of such ordinance? Some epithets might be appropriately applied to such a being. But would those epithets be kind' or 'beneficent'?

Man habitually sees the worst side of animals. No sooner do animals become acquainted with man than they acquire a dread which constantly oppresses them. Their actions are constrained, they are shy, and their ways are underhand, crawling, and devious. It is impossible-without taking pains to do so unobserved to ascertain the real motives and feelings of the lower animals. Many there are which habitually look miserable in the presence of man; in all probability because they are terrified. The hare has been the type of animal wretchedness (and with some reason as far as man has had it in his power). The Greek fable related that the hares thought themselves the most miserable of beings, and were going to drown themselves, until they saw the frogs. Yet Cowper found hares_even in confinement playful and frolicsome, always genuinely happy, except for sundry fits of bad temper. We may safely assert that the more closely men have been enabled to observe animal life, as it exists when freed from the constraint of overpowering humanity, the higher has been the conception formed by the observer of the gladness of that life.

The preceding considerations may help us to estimate the æsthetic value of the lives of the lower animals when compared with man in youth and maturity.

We may liken the total range of feeling to a musical scale, extending indefinitely upwards for pleasure and downwards for pain, with a neutral point of indifference dividing the two portions of the scale. Now in childhood the neutral point will occur low down in the scale; the whole scale itself is contracted, the pleasures few, and the pains still more diminished. With growth the scale lengthens, fresh pleasures become possible, while at the same time actions which before were pleasurable now become indifferent, and later wearisome. So the neutral point rises; but as the rise is by no

means commensurate with the upward expansion of pleasure, there is a vast gain, the proportion of pleasure to pain being so much greater than it was in the contracted scale of infancy. And when in maturity the scale reaches its greatest extent, so also does the supremacy of pleasure over pain. In declining years the process is reversed, the point of neutral feeling suffering a depression. And though it never again reaches such a low level as in infancy, its tendency is downwards. Concurrently with this is a general contraction of the scale; the pleasures diminish in number and intensity, but by no means so rapidly as the pains, until that state is attained of calm and equable content which ought to characterise old age. Some such contraction in the scale we may frequently notice in men who have suffered a serious illness, or who are overwhelmed by a mental or moral catastrophe. Slowly the sufferer becomes accustomed to the new conditions of his life. The energy which before was accustomed to spend itself in a wider activity, perhaps ceases to be generated, or finds other outlets; the scale of feeling contracts in both extremities; fewer pleasures are possible, and also fewer pains; until, perhaps, if the deadening influences are continued sufficiently long, there is little extension of the scale left in either direction; pleasures and pains range but little above or below the point of dull indifference. And so the captives of the Bastille when they were liberated crawled back to their dungeons, frightened at the too widely opening possibilities.

Now a similar scale for the animal would resemble that of childhood in the lowness of the neutral point, but it would possess a greatly increased upward extension into the pleasurable region. Some of the joys of the adult must be added to those of the child to represent the extent of animal pleasure, while at the same time the pains are no more than those of the infant. Thus while the scale is still contracted as compared with the adult man, yet the preponderance of the pleasurable portion is greater in the former than in the latter, by reason of the depression of the neutral point. The animal life is more pleasurable simply because the smaller and simpler stimuli which have become to man monotonous or indifferent yet retain for animals their pleasurable freshness, and thus a dog is enabled to extract enjoyment from a life which would be maddening to a civilised human being.

This does not enable us to put a very precise value on the life of an animal, but it does enable us to reaffirm more confidently the conclusion to which we were led by considering bodily pleasure and pains only—namely, that if in man's life there is a preponderance of pleasure, there is in the animal's a greater preponderance of pleasure; if in man there is but an equality between pleasure and pain, there is a decided preponderance of the former in animals; that, even if in man, on the whole, pain predominated, it is highly probable that in animals the proportions would be reversed.

B. CARLILL.

FRENCH PENAL COLONIES.

EFFORTS to found penal colonies range far back into French history; they date from a period long antecedent to the last craze for colonial aggrandisement. The very first attempt to sow the seeds of a prosperous community with the failures of society was in 1763, when the colonisation of French Guiana, already often attempted without success, was again tried on an ambitious scale. The project failed miserably. An expedition fourteen thousand strong, recruited mainly from the scum and sweepings of the streets of Paris, melted away within a year, and starvation carried off all whom the lethal climate spared. A second similar experiment was tried in 1766, with a like disastrous result. No serious importance could be attached to the colonising efforts of the victims exiled to Guiana by the revolutionary tribunals. Barely half survived the voyage, and the balance were in no condition to act as pioneers. The records of French Guiana are full of such fiascos, the most terrible of all being the philanthropic attempt of the Baron Milius, in 1823, to establish a penal colony on the banks of the Mana, by the marriage and expatriation of habitual criminals (récidivistes) and degraded women—a most ill-judged undertaking, speedily productive of ghastly, but nameless horrors.

After this, penal colonisation seems to have fallen into disfavour with France. Not only was it not renewed, but the principle of criminal deportation, of exile as a penalty, was formally condemned in 1847, both by such eminent publicists as MM. Lucas, De Beaumont, and De Tocqueville, and by the Government of the hour. Yet within a year or two, in 1851, it was restored to the French penal code, suddenly, and for reasons not readily apparent. To the new men in power there was probably something attractive in the theory of transportation, as may be seen from the high-sounding phrases that accompanied their decrees. The idea was not merely to banish the dangerous social elements to a distant soil; the young Republic wished to prove that humanity presided over all its actions.' Deportation, with the disciplinary processes that surrounded it, was expected to bring about the moral regeneration of those subjected to it; the convict would be transformed into a useful citizen; no longer a terror in his old home, he would aid the development of and become a positive benefactor to the new. The Government was, indeed,

so fascinated by the prospective advantages of transportation to the convicts themselves, that it expected them to accept it as a boon. Registers were opened at all the bagnes or seaport convict stations on which prisoners might inscribe their names as volunteers for the high favour of removal to the promised land beyond the seas. The philanthropic wish to benefit the exile was not, however, the sole preoccupation of the Government, as may be seen in various articles in the decrees. The hope of founding substantial colonial possessions was not disguised. The convict might benefit by expatriation; but so would his new country, and to a greater degree. He went out, in a measure, for his own good; he remained, willy nilly, for that of the community. It was laid down that even when emancipated he was to be kept in the colony; those sentenced for eight years and under must spend there a second period as long as the original sentence, those sentenced for more than eight years must remain in the colony for life. Their labour, their best energies, were thus impounded for the general good, in the sanguine expectation that they were being utilised in the progress and development of French colonisation.

We have here the most plausible explanation of the readiness with which the French Government revived transportation. The not unnatural desire to emulate the success of another Power and build up somewhere a French Australia was probably a powerful inducement to follow in our footsteps. But the French publicists looked only to results achieved; they ignored or misunderstood the steps by which they had been secured. They aspired to possess, without counting the cost of acquisition, without anticipating the difficulties, disappointments, the extravagant outlay, and the constant heartburning that for years and years went hand in hand with the growth of our Australian colonies. Strange to say, France adopted transportation just when we abandoned it. We had tried it with patient perseverance on the very widest and most expensive scale, often varying the system, taking up process after process, and rejecting all in turn, till we arrived at the unalterable conclusion, not perhaps with the best grace, but indubitably, that transportation, however defensible in theory, was in practice radically hopeless and impossible. The great Antipodean empire of which felon emigrants were the first pioneers had not really thriven and prospered through transportation, but in spite of it. No doubt there had been epochs in colonial life when the presence of a great mass of convict labour was distinctly beneficial to the young community. But the period was short, and the fleeting benefits were soon swallowed up and absorbed by many monstrous ills. The early history of New South Wales may be quoted in proof of this. Those old convict days were cursed with many woes. Society was debased, demoralised; corruption, widespread drunkenness, and debauchery universal. It is almost unnecessary to recapitulate the many grievous evils that flowed