386 REPORT— 1882. 



§ 16. Crime and Education. 



The bulk of criminals are generally found to be illiterate, and no 

 wonder, for ignorance restricts the chances of employment, and renders a 

 person the easy dupe of designing men. Education elevates the mind, 

 raises the morals, enlarges the desire for the pure, and diminishes the 

 desire for the impure, brings within the reach of all the works of the 

 highest minds, and if it does not succeed in controlling the affections, it 

 has an important influence in turning them to what is noble and right. 

 Pear has been entertained that education may engender dissatisfaction 

 with the lower occupations of life, and that by creating a capacity for 

 greater enjoyments than the conditions of society enable the people to 

 obtain, education may increase instead of diminishing the restiveness of 

 the people, and thereby tend to the production of crime. But no such 

 fear need be entertained, for the field of human labour is ever widening, 

 and education offers resources and remedies which sweeten the acerbities 

 of life and tend to ennoble the commonest of human services. Again, 

 take the twelve most criminal counties in England and Wales, and you 

 will find them to contain more persons not able to read and write than 

 are to be found in the'twelve least criminal counties. 



§ 17. Crime and Drunhenness. 



To what extent drunkenness proves to be the direct or indirect cause 

 of crime is not easy to define. In the same manner as crime, drunken- 

 ness is often the effect of weak self-control, of want of moral power, 

 though oftener still of wanton dissipation and sensuous indulgence. 

 However produced, drunkenness unhinges the mind and is sure to be the 

 concomitant of vice and crime. An inordinate expenditure in drink is, 

 moreover, an immediate cause of mucb suffering and miseiy, and too 

 often casts the labourer to the workhouse and the prison. Alas, how 

 many hopes are blasted, how many families are ruined, through excess of 

 drink. The twelve most criminal counties in England and Wales have a 

 larger proportion of committals for drunkenness than the twelve least 

 criminal counties. And the twelve counties where there is the largest 

 number of cases of drunkenness, have likewise a larger proportionate 

 number of committals for indictable offences, and nearly double the 

 number of cases of lawlessness. 



§ 18. Crime and Family Quarrels. 



Where the causes are fathomed to tlieir real source, family dissensions 

 are found to contribute a pretty large quota of crime. Property, un- 

 requited affections, unfaithfulness, and other quarrels, envenom the 

 family life, and the results are -an increasing number of divorces and 

 judicial separations in the civil courts, and of suicides and crimes in the 

 criminal. In France in 1870 15 per cent, of the crimes of poisoning, 

 arson, murder, and assassination were ascribed to domestic dissensions 

 and money disputes among relatives. 



§ 19. Crime and the Criminal Classes. 



There is yet another cause of crime ever active, ever present ; the 

 existence of the criminal classes, some at large, some in prison, some 



