48 
tion the ratio of one in every thirty-four. But in Richmond, 
the capital of a State endlessly reviled for its illiteracy, 
the same classes of whites bore to the whole number of 
white citizens the ratio of one to every one hundred and 
twelve! The difference in favour of the less lettered com- 
munities, as revealed by subsequent censuses, is still more 
astounding; and this, when extended to the whole South, as 
compared with the North, and as deduced by Northern students 
of statistics. 
Now, were these enumerations of sequences employed in 
the same illogical way, they would seem to demonstrate 
exactly the opposite conclusion, that the knowledge of letters 
causes crime, and illiteracy causes virtue. This is a sufficiently 
biting demonstration of the worthlessness of the pretended 
induction. The true solution, to which the comparison of the 
two enumerations points, is this, that neither letters nor illi- 
teracy causes crime in America, but another combination of 
moral causes, to which these states of the population are 
themselves related as effects. In any given prison will be 
found a majority of prisoners who cannot read and write. 
This does not prove that the possession of these arts is pre- 
ventive of crime, as the other statistics show. But as 
American society happens to be constituted, the rearing of 
children without a knowledge of letters has happened to be 
the usual accompaniment of a domestic condition of penury 
and moral degradation, while families of substance and, 
domestic morality have usually given letters to their children. 
Thus it is made plain that it is not the illiteracy, but the 
penury and domestic degradation which are the real causes of 
crime. The illiteracy turns out not to be the cause at all, but 
an incident or appendage which the domestic habits of 
Americans have connected with the real cause, the combina- 
tion of want and domestic degradation. 
But when, by the intrinsic activity of the civil government, 
the children of destitute and morally degraded families are 
universally invested with the arts of reading and writing, 
without that moral and economical elevation of the parents 
and children, to work which the State and State schools are 
so nearly impotent, then the result is a fearful increase in the 
ratio of criminals to the whole number of citizens. The 
explanation is, that it is the want and family degradation 
which together are the main efficient cause of crime, and 
which the knowledge of letters, while those continue, rather 
aggravates than checks. 
