FOREIGN CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 143 



22,168. A similar inquiry as to crimes of the 2nd class, produces — in 

 the north, 1 in 3,984 ; east, 1 in 6,949 ; south, 1 in 7,534 ; west, 1 in 

 7,945 ; centre, 1 in 8,265. Following up an investigation of the alleged 

 influence of education as a preventive of crime, M. G. infers that it does 

 not in reality exist: his 10th table shows the distribution of education in 

 the 5 regions. M. G. then goes on to define the proportion between the 

 legitimate and illegitimate births, showing the excess of the latter in 

 those departments where foundling hospitals have been instituted ; to 

 this M. M. Lacroix, Silvestre and Gerard, have appended a remark in 

 their Report, stating, that by an effect, similar to that of those hospitals, 

 the poor laws in England increase unlimitedly, the number of poor. M. 

 Guerry's next principal object is to show the amount of suicides ; from 

 his research, it appears that from 1827 to 1830, the return for the whole 

 kingdom was 6,900, or nearly 1800 annually. The result of the geogra- 

 phical distribution of suicides in the 5 regions, proves that out of every 

 annual hundred, 51 take place in the north; 11 in the south ; 16 in the 

 east; 13 in the west ; and 9 in the centre. In proportion to 4;he popula- 

 tion — in the north, 1 in 9,853 ; east, 1 in 21,734 ; centre, 1 in 27,393 ; 

 west, 1 in 30,499 ; and south, 1 in 30,876. It is worthy of observation, 

 that in the single department of the Seine, there annually occurs l-6th 

 of the entire suicides in the kingdom ; the majority of these are, how- 

 ever, committed by strangers in the capital. The 11th table is devoted 

 to a statement of the suicides in Paris. Seven engraved illustrative 

 charts accompany the work. 



We may here close the volume, having given the reader a tolerable 

 notion of its contents. One or two remarks we must, however, make 

 before taking our leave of the writer. In admitting that out of every 

 hundred crimes of the first magnitude eighty-six are committed by men, 

 M. G. hastens eagerly to argue that this inferiority in guilt is not as 

 we have usually imagined, the consequence of the natural virtues of 

 women, but rather of their physical weakness J ! The native purity of the 

 sex, "the last, best work of God," is with this frigid advocate but a 

 dream; the ** angel of life" is in his estimate but a piece of soiled clay, 

 willing to commit atrocities, from which she refrains only through 

 inability. But the gallant adv^ocate forgets in his crusade against woman 

 that pity and tenderness have their abode in her bosom, and lead to an 

 endurance and a forgiveness of injuries, however cruel and long-inflicted ; 

 in her forbearance, the Frenchman sees nothing but an incapacity to 

 avenge herself; he is unmindful that what man may effect by mere 

 force, woman may compass by stratagem ; and in his dishonourable 

 anxiety to persuade us that she would fill up the measure of guilt if she 

 could, he loses all thought of the hireling assassin, the dagger that drinks 

 the blood of the sleeper, and the hemlock that freezes the fountain of 

 life. He beholds her cowering beneath a consciousness of her physical 

 incapacity for violence, and deterred by pusillanimous fears, not recol- 

 lecting that the heroism which nerved the hand of a Charlotte Corday, 

 also conducted her with unquailing intrepidity to the scaffold. He 

 forgets also that a sense of morality and religion is so much more power- 

 ful in the breast of woman than in that of man ; that she is created with 

 a thousand pure sympathies and soft impulses of mercy ungiven to the 

 ruder sex, and he forgets, too, that the more scrupulous education 

 which she receives, the early discipline of her emotions to which she 

 is happily encouraged, strengthen and nourish the virtues with which 

 God has endowed her. In fine, M. Guerry has laboured to countenance 

 the preponderance of crime amongst men by a bold conjecture that 

 women are deficient, not in the ''penchans criminels," but in the induce- 



