216 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



built and occupied. The very convenience of city life is paid for 

 by added crime. The disorder that might be allowed in a wilder- 

 ness among savages can not be tolerated in a crowded metropolis 

 among civilized people. The ten States that have the largest 

 cities punish fifty per cent more violence and sixty per cent more 

 drunkenness than their share, though they have twenty per cent 

 less than their proportion of murders. Petty crimes come from 

 civilization, great crimes from barbarism. But among barbarians 

 great crimes are called virtues, and petty crimes are unknown or 

 unnoted. 



I think, then, we need not fear that universal education is to 

 bring us universal crime. We want more and better education. 

 Of course, it is not the mere ability to read and write that is to 

 save a man from prison. He must learn self-control and acquire 

 a loftier standard of life. Mr. Reece dwells much upon the fact 

 that a large percentage of our criminals can read and write. But 

 that does not prove that their education made them criminals. I 

 dare say a still larger percentage of them can see, yet it was not 

 their ability to see that made them criminals. The densest igno- 

 rance may, like total blindness, keep men from crime ; but we do 

 not propose to put out our eyes of either mind or body. We will 

 have men learn to see better, morally and physically. It is im- 

 perfect education that has brought men to prison, as we see from 

 the constant relation of our criminal class to our illiterate classes. 

 They may, indeed, have some sort of an education, but the vast 

 majority of them are ignorant themselves, and have ignorant 

 kindred and associates ; and to be ignorant amid the civilization 

 of to-day is to be jealous and bitter and rebellious. 



The very fact that Mr. Reece cites to prove his thesis, that igno- 

 rance is innocence and knowledge crime, disproves it most com- 

 pletely. South Carolina, he says, has the highest percentage of 

 illiteracy and the lowest of crime ; but, if he had taken one glance 

 below the surface, he would have seen a fact far more " novel and 

 threatening " than any he discovered. Out of the 626 criminals 

 of South Carolina, 570 are black and only 56 are white. Why 

 are there ten times as many blacks as whites in jail, when they 

 constitute only three fifths of the population ? The only answer 

 the census gives is in the fact that they are three times as illiter- 

 ate as the whites. So that the very State summoned to prove that 

 ignorance is exemption from crime, has ten elevenths of its crimi- 

 nals from the most ignorant class in the country. But perhaps 

 Mr. Reece thinks that their ignorance is not quite dense enough, as 

 one in four can still write. They certainly have not yet reached 

 the point where ignorance is bliss. 



