WE have a distinct recollection a correspondence which took place in the local Press some years ago on the subject of Education and Crime. The advocate for education as a means of lessening wrong-doing had little difficulty in shattering the arguments of his opponent, who saw in the concurrent rise of education and decline in belief something which to his mind tended to add to rather than decrease evil. Many still fail to understand the why and the wherefore of the continuously improving returns that are being made year by year in England. We need not dip too deeply into psychologic truth to find reasons for them, but will content ourselves with an examination of the latest completed and tabulated returns at our disposal. The year was 1899.
The first thing to strike us is the highly satisfactory fact that we have to go back 31 years to find the largest recorded number of crimes since 1857. In 1868 there were set down in Britain's black books 101,369 crimes. In 1899, the number was 76,025. Still a large number, the pessimist may say, and nothing much to boast about. True, but there are other points to note in connection therewith, The population in 1868 was only 21,948,713; in 1899 it was 81,764,714, so that while population had increased 45 per cent, crime had decreased 25 per cent. Or to put it in another way, in '68 there were 461.8 crimes per 100,000 of the population, while in 1899 there were but 239.3. We may say then that crime has decreased by half. It will be remembered that it was not till 1870 that Great Britain began seriously to tackle the question of popular education, and that this steady improvement has continued ever since and is still going on.
If it should be urged that education has but a small share in this result, that some of the greatest scoundrels hung and unhung have been highly-educated men, the argument may be put in still another form. Careful statistics are kept and exact figures are at our disposal to silence this suggestion. The number of convicted prisoners in 1899 was 154,754. Of these we have the following interesting facts Those who could neither read not write were...19% read and write a little.........75 fo read and write well... were of superior instruction, It would be absurd, of course, to push these eloquent figures too far. The illiterate are likewise the poor, the hungry, the naked, the shiftless. It is not likely we shall ever be able to eliminate such a class, even were a university career open to them all. There will be "the fraudulent bankrupt, the bogus company promoter, the forger, and the highly skilled felon," until our ethical system has reached a far higher standard than we can even hope for as yet.
But in law, as in other matters, it is undeniable that prevention is better than cure. The school is cheaper than the gaol, because its training tends to the performance of "duty in that state of life unto which it has pleased God to call" us, because it shows how a living is to be got, and what are the most effective means of getting it. Every criminal not only preys upon the community like the tiger upon the ruminant, but when caught and caged has still to be fed at the ex-poor of his captors. No civilised land has as yet discovered a means of ridding itself once for all of its parasites. Professor Morley once wrote a clever skit in the form of a story in which he outlined the practices of a race of people living in the interior of the earth, who were so far in advance of us that their criminals and paupers cost them nothing beyond the first cost of filling their stomachs with a kind of patent cement, which gave them a somewhat jaundiced complexion but otherwise kept them going without further supplies.
uch a method being as yet unknown to us in practical life, we have to try to do the next best thing, and that is, by the inculcation of moral principle, and the teaching of technical work to induce more people to labour, and fewer to loaf. Strange as it may seem, even to this day the value of education has never yet come home to the heart of the English as it has to that of the Americans, the Germans, and the Scotch. he average age when children leave school in these three countries differs considerably. By making two or three bites at a very small cherry we have raised the leaving age in England two or three years, but it is still below that of the three countries named, and country newspapers frequently record cases in which parents, summoned for breaking the compulsory school law, are let off altogether because perhaps ithe J.P. himself may have been a party to the crime by employing children under the legal age.
It would be interesting to know how China would stand were her statistics kept as those of Eagland are.
It is a common belief amongst copie outside China, that the Chinese are an educated race, and itis a fact that a great number of them can read and write more or less, usually less. But making every allowance possible, the trath would be that according to a Scotch or German or American standard probably 90 per cent of the Chinese are quite illiterate. With us the educated man is not he or she who can read and write merely. Much more than that is required. Whereas reading includes the greater part of the ordinary Chinaman's acquirements, and even that, so great are the difficulties of the character, is very imperfectly done. Patriotic natives—really patriotic, not of the Boxer class—recognise that the great problem before them is that of education. People only need to know what is right and the great majority will do it. More schools and' fewer gaols therefore must for the future be the motto of every progressive State.
THE NEW TARIFF, 2nd November, THE cynic, particularly the Chinese cynic, will have cause for chuckling, consumedly on the eleventh of this month when the new tariff—only provisional tariff—comes into operation at all the Chinese treaty ports. Foreigners in China last year were murdered, burnt oat of house and home, fired at with shot and shell, harried and hustled in every barbara ous way, Even in ports where there was no actual outbreak they were scared into taking measures for self-defence. Peace-loving citizens had to tura out and put on an ill-fitting khaki uniform, and "trail a pike" in the form of " Lee-Metford while, as once in Rom", "Old mon girt on their old swords, And went to man the wall."
"Who breaks, pays" in China as elsewhere, and China is called upon to pay for her madness last year; but this being a topsy-tury country, there is a turn of the wrist at Peking, and lo! it is the foreign victims who have to pay, just when they thought they were to have some compensation for all they had gone through. No wonder the cynic chuckles. Instead of the specific rates of import duty to which merchants have been accustomed for years, and which only averaged about three per cent, they have to begin on Monday week to pay what is pleasantly called an effective five per cent; and they may feel as the medieval criminal did when the executioner allowed to him that the rack was not a handsome instrument, but it was effective. We need not dwell on the trouble involved in the production of, and wrangling over, invoices, and the wide door that an ad valorem tariff sets ajar for evasion; a more serious matter is the actual increase in the duties that will have to be paid. Political economists reassure the discontented importers by telling them that it is
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.