214 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



And when we remember that the greatest illiteracy is to be found 

 in the former slave States, we- see that the increase of the criminal 

 ratio in the South may not be due wholly to ignorance, in spite of 

 census figures. The ignorance and the crime were both there be- 

 fore the criminals were locked up and counted in the census. 



One might, indeed, claim that the lessened ignorance had much 

 to do with revealing this criminal element and imprisoning it. And 

 this brings us to our third cause of the increased ratio of crime. 

 The gradual elevation in the standard of life, and the intervention 

 of the courts in cases which were formerly decided by the bullet 

 or the knife, occasions a rapid increase in the official number of 

 criminals. 



Drunkenness, I suppose, was not a crime anywhere in our land 

 half a century ago. Now drunkenness and disorderly conduct 

 form one tenth of all the crime of the country. And naturally 

 the restraint of these offenders will be most complete in the most 

 orderly and educated parts of our land. Accordingly, we find that 

 the ten educated States show a proportion of imprisonments for 

 these offenses tenfold greater than the uneducated States do. The 

 one has 2,865 and the other only 198 in a population three fourths 

 as large. And the educated States record three times as many pris- 

 oners as the uneducated States for assault and battery and simple 

 assault. If any one wishes to prove from the census that educa- 

 tion is a failure, he could find no stronger facts than these — a ten- 

 fold larger share of drunkenness and a threefold larger share of 

 violence in the States where men can read and write than in the 

 States where they can not. 



But, of course, no one thinks that the South is more quiet, or- 

 derly, and innocent than the North. No one believes that there was 

 not a single case of drunkenness or disorder in all Alabama and Ar- 

 kansas in 1880, and only a score of cases of assault, while Massachu- 

 setts, with a less population, had 597 cases of drunkenness and dis- 

 order and 337 cases of assault ; yet this is what the census tells us. 

 The natural interpretation must be, that drunkenness and violence 

 are not punished by imprisonment in certain States, while they are 

 in others, and the States that punish least are most illiterate. This 

 interpretation is amply confirmed by the census itself. Though 

 education shows three times the violence that ignorance does, yet 

 ignorance perpetrates three times as many murders as education, 

 and that, too, while two or three of the educated States imprison 

 the murderer for life, and so swell the number, and while the illit- 

 erate States do not even think of arresting some murderers, and 

 often acquit others who are most notoriously guilty. It was only 

 last year that all the land heard that a certain Dr. McDow, a mar- 

 ried man of Charleston, S. C, murdered a Captain Dawson, simply 

 because he saved a girl whom the doctor was trying to ruin. No 



