STATE OF CRIME IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND. 375 



State of Grime in England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1880. 

 By Professor Leone Levi, F.S.A. 



[A communication ordered by the General Committee to be printed in extcnso among 



tlie Reports.] 



[Plate IV.] 



§ 1. Introductory. 



Seldom has public attention been so intensely directed to tlie state of 

 crime as witliin recent years, the frequent reports of appalling murders 

 and other heavy offences, especially in Ireland, seeming to indicate that 

 national morals are not improving as one might expect. Is it, or is it not, 

 the fact that the spread of instruction and science is a safeguard against 

 crime, and that all the forces of civilisation tend to refine and elevate the 

 manners of the people ? Happily a question of such momentous impor- 

 tance is capable of being tested by numbers, and it is given to the 

 statistician to confirm or correct any hasty impression by the unanswer- 

 able logic of facts. 



The statistical method, however, is not free from diificulty. We may 

 gauge the criminality of a state by the enormity of the crimes therein 

 committed at any given time, by their number and frequency, by the 

 number of persons concerned in them, by the difficulty of detection, by 

 the shelter and support afforded to criminals, by the tone of the public press 

 with regard to crimes and criminals, or by the general character of the 

 circumstances connected with their occurrence. What, however, if the 

 crimes recorded should be altogether of a special charactex', the result, it 

 may be of a political revolution, or of war, famine, or agrarian grievances ? 

 In times of great aberration, as in France during the Reign of Terror 

 in 1791, or during the Commune in 1870, in Ireland in 1798 and 1821, 

 events occur and crimes are committed, which cannot be taken as 

 representing in any wise the ordinary criminality of the nation. At such 

 times the moral sense of large numbers seems corrupted and blunted, 

 passion and the lowest instincts appear to acquire complete sovereignty 

 over reason and conscience, aikd public sentiment is, for the nonce, al- 

 together in abeyance. There are, in truth, storms in the moral, as well 

 as in the physical, atmosphere, the results of which, however startling, 

 do not represent the ordinary state of morals, nor materially disturb the 

 normal progress of society. 



To arrive at any solid conclusions from statistical observation, the 

 phenomena observed must embrace large numbers of facts, occurring over 

 a lengthened period of time, and operating under widely different circum- 

 stances. Nor can we take the records of crime in any country as a 

 complete or sufficient evidence of the morals of the nation, for the more 

 efficient are the means for the detection of crime, the stronger the evidence 

 that the moral sense of the nation rebels against it. Moreover, the moral 

 nature of an act is, unfortunately, of no value in determining whether it 

 is criminal or not ; for, on the one hand, an act may be grossly immoral 

 and yet it may not bring its agent within the pale of the criminal law, as 

 in the case of adultery. And, on the other hand, an act perfectly innocent 

 from a moral point of view, may render the doer amenable to punishment 

 as a criminal. 



