RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 58, 2 December 1930, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL r

(By

Kickshaws.)

A scientist states that even Insects play games. So that is the origin of midget golf. • ♦ * Snails have held up a train in Morocco. On some lines wo know the reverse occurs. » * • A famous mountaineer claims to have climbed over a million feet. A habitually late theatre-goer says fie can easily double this record. • « » A French bank has failed. The founder has been charged with frauds exceeding £10,006,000. He Is supposed to have manipulated Bourse prices by printing fictitious quotations in his newspaper. There is something magnificent about high finance of this type. The stupid fool Who is convicted of absconding with half-a-crown makes on feel sad; the man who Walks off with a few millions invokes a feeling of admiration. Unfortunately there are more of them than might be imagined. Some 52 years ago the directors of the City of Glasgow Bank went “broke” to the tune of £6,000,000. For three years the real state of affairs was concealed by false balance-sheets. Not many years later Jabez Balfour and his friends fraudulently absorbed four or five millions sterling, and got fourteen years for doing it, when they Went smash with liabilities of over £8,000,000. Ernbst Terah Hooley, another “high finance” juggler, made a profit of £7,000,000 in two years some thirty years ago. Perhaps his most spectacular deal was to buy a well-known tire Company for £3,000,000* and sell it a few months later for £5,000,000. In his case, When the time of reckoning came, liabilities only amounted to £l,500,000. Altogether over one hundred millions had passed through his hands He wan able to escape out of the wreckage and lives to this day nt Risley In great magnificence. Whitaker Wright Of recent years learned the tricks of the trade from Hooley himself. In his case when the crash came, to the tune of three or four millions, he chose the easy way outa-deiith. Hatry must therefore be considered a more noble fraud. He is still serving his sentence for recent defalcations of two or three millions. i * * • A campaign is on foot in an English newspaper to put a stop to the barbarities of that French morgue for living convicts, better known as Devil’s Island. If writing could put a stop to this blot On French civilisation nothing better could have been done by the pen. Each year a new batch of convicts —murderers, political offenders, traitors, yes, but human beings —are hoarded behind iron cages on tlie convict ship for transportation to tlie fever-s tri eken districts of. French Guiana, It is perhaps just as well not to confuse the place Devil’s Island with the rest of the prison settlement. Devil’s Island is set apart aS a peculiarly obnoxious resort for troublesome cases. As a rule there are not more than a score of prisoners on Devil’s Island. The rest of the prisoners number some 7000 and are scattered between prison camps at Cayenne, St. Laurent du Mofonl, and other “health resorts.” <> s> » Moreover, in addition to Devil’s Island there are several other lonely islands such as Les Iles du Saint, lie de Joseph, and lie Royale. There are prisoners on all of them. The horror of these islands is their minuteness, especially Devil’s Island. In twenty minutes tt man can walk right round It. The Island consists of a mere t'Ock with a few palms. Month after month, year after year, the prisoners drag out an existence there. The toar of the sea is the only sound. Their only companions are the sharks that guard the place, while froth above the blistering equatorial sun pours down day after day, churning the atmosphere to greenhouse beat Dreyfus, the only man to escape from the place, Was tortured there with every refinement known to psychologists. He Was left utterly aloiie oil the tliiy rock. When it Was discovered that his only solace Was to sit on a promontory and look out toward France, the authorities built a palisade to cut off the View. Richard, the man who betrayed Nurse Caveli, is on Devil's Island at the moment.

Although life ou the Island is bad, Unspeakable mediaeval horrors are perpetrated In the mainland prisons. For the most part men work for a timber company run entirely by convict labour. No colour feeling is tolerated. Meli who give trouble are confined in tiny evil-smelling cells for long stretches.' The man in charge is an Arab. He has been purposely selected because once he was maltreated by White tnen. He is now encouraged to get his own back. For minor offences forty then are shut Up in ti fiari’hv room so closely packed that lheif beds touch. Anyone Who has tried to sleep under tlie best conditioils in the tropics will realise the full significance of this torture.

Convicts are not supplied with slices or sucks. Mostly they wear only a pair of tattered trousers. In this garb they are forced to work in snake-infested forests full of biting tarantula spiders, poisonous ticks and fever mosquitoes. When n mail eventually becomes free —9O per cent, gaiti their freedom by death—“liberes” have to remain in French Guiana for as many years as they have served sentence. As. thereJs little demand for labour this is iu itself almost more deadly than tlie sentence. Tliti business houses take good care tliat these liberated prisoners shall never earn enough money to pay their fare Inline. Tlie system. Iu fact. Is pure slavery. Journalists Who have visited the place state unanimously that it is a “living, festering bell, comparable only to the worst features of the old Belgian Congo or Putamayo. Yet France claim-' to be an eminently civilised country. There seem to be hits of her-make up 20 ! ' vents out of date. ‘'l,a Gii.viine" is one of tlie big ger bits. , , * Alas! How easily things go wrong! A sigh too deep, or a kiss too long: And then comes a mist nnd a weeping rain And life i» never the same again. —Macdonald,