of Jesuit conspiracies against the government.[901] The Azores, soon after their rediscovery in 1431, were colonized largely by Flemish refugees,[902] just as Iceland was peopled by rebellious Norwegians.  To such voluntary exiles the dividing sea gives a peculiar sense of security, this by a psychological law.  Hence England owing to its insular location, and also to its free government, has always been an asylum for the oppressed.  The large body of Huguenot refugees who sought her shores after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes added a valuable element to her population.

[Sidenote:  Convict islands.]

Islands find their populations enriched by the immigration of this select class who refuse to acquiesce in oppression and injustice.  But the geographic conditions which make islands natural asylums make them also obvious places of detention for undesirable members of society; these conditions render segregation complete, escape difficult or impossible, and control easy.  Hence we find that almost all the nations of the world owning islands have utilized them as penal stations.  From the gray dawn of history the Isles of the Blessed have been balanced by the isles of the cursed.  The radiant Garden of Hesperides has found its antithesis in the black hell of Norfolk Isle, peopled by the “doubly condemned” criminals whom not even the depraved convict citizens of Botany Bay could tolerate.[903] There is scarcely an island of the Mediterranean without this sinister vein in its history.  The archipelagoes of the ancient Aegean were constantly receiving political exiles from continental Greece.  Augustus Caesar confined his degenerate daughter Julia, the wife of Tiberius, on the island of Pandateria, one of the Ponza group; and banished her paramour, Sempronius Gracchus, to Cercina in the Syrtis Minor off the African coast.[904] Other Roman matrons of high degree but low morals and corrupt officials were exiled to Corsica, Sardinia, Seriphos, Amorgos and other of the Cyclades.[905] To-day Italy has prisons or penal stations in Ischia, the Ponza group, Procida, Nisida, Elba, Pantellaria, Lampedusa, Ustica, and especially in the Lipari Isles, where the convicts are employed in mining sulphur, alum and pumice from the volcanic cones.[906]

[Sidenote:  Penal colonies on uninhabited islands.]

In modern times many remote oceanic islands have gotten their first or only white settlers from this criminal class.  Such are the citizens whom Chile has sent to Easter Isle twenty-five hundred miles away out in the Pacific.[907] The inhabitants of Fernando Noronha, 125 miles off the eastern point of South America, are convicts from Brazil, together with the warders and troops who guard them.[908] In 1832 Ecuador began to use the uninhabited Gallapagos Islands, lying 730 miles west of its coast, as a penal settlement.[909] The history of St. Helena is typical.  Its first inhabitants were some Portuguese deserters who in punishment