AW 
One more application will be made, and this to a supposed 
social and moral induction; in order to exhibit the fitness of 
the logical canons for ethical as well as physical science. The 
case is that of the colligation of instances, so often presented 
by the enthusiastic fanatics in the cause of secular education, 
as a proof of their proposition that this species of education 
promotes virtue and suppresses crime. The supposed evidence 
is, that the statistics of prisons, penitentiaries, and criminal 
convictions usually show a ratio of illiterate to educated 
criminals considerably larger than the ratio of illiterate to 
lettered citizens in the commonwealth. The governor of an 
American commonwealth, for instance, reported that of all 
the convicts in his state-penitentiary for ten years, only a little 
more than ten per cent. could read and write. And he pre- 
sented this as a conclusive demonstration that illiteracy was 
the cause, and a knowledge of letters would be the suflicient 
cure, of crime. 
Now, a very simple application of the logical criticism dis- 
closes the inconclusiveness of this popular argument. The 
effect to be accounted for is, breaches of statute laws. The 
observed antecedent. to this effect is, in a large majority of 
cases in this State, ignorance of letters. Obviously, this is 
but an induction per enumerationem simplicem, which gives 
no proof whether the sequence give a post hoc or a propter hoc. 
The argument offers neither canon of induction to complete 
the separation. We have in this enumeration nothing what- 
ever to teach us whether the true efficient of the crimes does 
not he, hitherto unnoted, between the supposed antecedent, 
illiteracy, and the effect. The pretended argument gives us 
no ground whatever for excluding this other obvious hypo- 
thesis, that something else may have been the true cause of 
the crimes, of which cause the illiteracy itself may be also 
another co-ordinate effect. 
As soon as another equally authentic enumeration is com- 
pared with the previous one, the justice of this suspicion is 
fully confirmed. Farther study of the statistics of crime 
shows, that while American prisons contain a larger per- 
centage of illiterate criminals than American society contains 
of illiterate free citizens, yet the ratio of criminals to the 
whole number of citizens in any given community is uniformly 
far larger where all, or nearly all, adults can read and write, 
and far smaller where fewer of the adults can read and write. 
For instance, in Boston, the boastful metropolis of free schools, 
with scarcely an adult who could not read and write, the 
census of 1850 showed that the white persons in jails, peni- 
tentiaries, and alms-houses bore to the whole white popula- 
