212 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sion, if we may be allowed to use the same reasoning that he does. 

 For his statistics only show that crime and edncation are both 

 increasing. But that does not prove that the increase in educa- 

 tion is the cause of the increase in crime. Diseases have increased 

 during the past half-century, and so has medical skill ; but that 

 does not prove that the one increase was caused by the other. 

 Perhaps the increase of diseases would have been far greater had 

 it not been for the increase in the power to cope with them. So 

 education may, for aught Mr. Reece's statistics prove, be the only 

 thing that prevents a still more rapid growth in crime. 



The statistics of our last report show that the most enormous 

 strides in developing a criminal class have been taken in those 

 States where ignorance, and not education, most aboimds. If we 

 take the ten States that have the largest number of citizens un- 

 able to write, we shall find that from 1850 to 1880 the ratio of their 

 prisoners has increased over fivefold, from one in 5,400 to one in 

 970 ; from 1860 to 1880 it has grown threefold, or from one in 3,600 

 to one in 970 ; while the ten States that have the fewest citizens 

 unable to write have swelled the proportion of their criminals 

 only threefold for the longer period and only fifty per cent for the 

 shorter — the figures being, for 1850 one in 3,100, for 1860 one in 

 1,500, and for 1880 one in 1,050. So that in the States of greatest 

 illiteracy the relative increase of criminals during the last twenty 

 years has been six times as rapid as in the States of least illiteracy. 

 And if we ask in what classes the most ignorance is to be found, 

 our census tells us that the foreign-born are fifty per cent more 

 illiterate than the natives, and the blacks seven times as illiterate 

 as the whites ; and our census tells us. further that the foreign- 

 born furnish one hundred per cent more than their share of crimi- 

 nals, and the blacks one hundred and fifty per cent more than 

 their share. 



Do not these facts prove that the advance in crime is the result 

 not of education but of the absence of education ? We might 

 think so, if figures had not that reprehensible habit of being all 

 things to all men. Therefore, we may find, upon a more careful 

 examination, that there is some other cause than ignorance for 

 this rapid growth of our prison population in certain parts of our 

 country. If I am not mistaken, there are several such causes, some 

 of them entirely independent of the change in the illiteracy of the 

 nation. One of them lies in the transition from an unsettled con- 

 dition to a settled condition on our constantly advancing frontier : 

 another is in the change from slavery in the South ; and, a third is 

 in the gradual elevation of the standard of human conduct, mak- 

 ing crimes of actions that had been only lawful escapades in ear- 

 lier times. 



The first cause comes out clearly if we compare the ten States 



