EDUCATION AND CRIME. 211 



ing f or some unpleasant detail, some crude idea. Nothing could 

 be less proper ; no building, no matter what its form, should be 

 condemned until we know its purpose, and whether it fills it or 

 not. The very fact that it is necessary to speak of " knowing the 

 purpose " of a building shows how thoroughly the art has degen- 

 erated. 



■♦•» 



EDUCATION AND CRIME. 



By Rev. A. W. GOULD. 



IN the January number of The Popular Science Monthly there 

 was an article by Benjamin Reece on Public Schools as affect- 

 ing Crime and Vice. In that article Mr. Reece mentions the fact 

 that " in the decade ending with 1880, population having increased 

 thirty per cent and illiteracy only ten per cent, the number of 

 criminals present the alarming increase of eighty-two per cent." 

 And he asks : " Can it be possible that with greater educational fa- 

 cilities there is to be increased crime ? Perish the thought ! Yet 

 if the instruction of our common schools subdues the tendency to 

 crime,' why is it that the ratio of prisoners, being one in every 

 3,442 in 1850, rose to one in every 1,647 in 1860, one in 1,021 in 1870, 

 and one in 837 in 1880 ? " He tells us further that " the illiterates 

 of the United States comprise seventeen per cent of the total pop- 

 ulation. . . . The general average of illiteracy is exceeded by ev- 

 ery one of the original slave States with the exception of Missouri, 

 but the average ratio of the mentally and morally unsound is 

 only reached in the State of Maryland. South Carolina, which 

 shows the highest percentage of illiterates, presents the lowest 

 average of any State in the Union as regards insanity and crime " ; 

 and his conclusion is that " our condition of decreasing illiteracy 

 and increasing crime" means that "in the adjustment of our 

 schools we have gone too far in our aim for material advance- 

 ment and development of wealth, and that we are correspond- 

 ingly losing in the direction of moral growth and culture." 



In other words, he thinks that the United States census proves 

 that the increase of prisoners in our prisons is the result of the 

 increase of pupils in our schools. And as I find that these " novel 

 and threatening facts" have aroused some apprehension among 

 those interested in our public-school system, it seems to me desira- 

 ble that some one should point out the figures in our census which 

 seriously modify, if not wholly destroy, Mr. Reece's alarming in- 

 ference that our public schools are nurseries of crime. 



Figures, like Bible-texts, may not lie, but they can be made to 

 prove almost anything ; and it would not be difficult to establish, 

 by our census figures, the exact opposite of Mr. Reece's conclu- 



