Art. VII. — International Statistical Uniformity. 

 By Hexry D'Esterre Taylor. 



{Read 8th August, 1885.: 



In attempting to bring under notice some suggestions 

 tending to promote uniformity in international statistics, a 

 brief recapitulation of the circumstances which led to their 

 inception may not be out of place. One of the vital ques- 

 tions which, under various aspects, is engaging public 

 attention in the Australian colonies, is a consideration of the 

 more prominent characteristics of the growing native (white) 

 race, and the effects they are likely to produce on the future 

 history of this portion of the British Empire, Perhaps the 

 phase of this development which attracts most notice at 

 present is the one locally known as " larrikinism," a term 

 ha vino- a somewhat similar signification as " rough" has in 

 London and " hoodlum" has in San Francisco. It includes 

 all the lighter offences against order usually committed by 

 young offenders up to twenty, or even flve-and-twenty years 

 of age. A local lecturer, who is credited with havino- had 

 exceptional opportunities of forming a correct judgment, 

 went so far lately as to assert that juvenile crime, or larri- 

 kinism, was more rampant in the colony of Victoria than in 

 any other part of the world. Pressed for statistical or other 

 reliable authorities, he was only able to fall back on "his 

 own observation" in support of his statement. Doubting 

 the correctness of his conclusions from the tenor of other 

 statistics I had collected on the "Young Australian" ques- 

 tion, I endeavoured to test them by procuring official figures 

 showing the amount of juvenile crime existing, in proportion 

 to their populations, in the principal English-speaking com- 

 munities — Great Britain, Canada, and the United States — 

 and comparing them with similar statistics from our own 

 colony of Victoria. The results, after many hours of labour 

 and research, only demonstrated the impossibility of suc- 

 ceeding in this task, owing to the dissimilarity existing in 

 the statistical divisions adopted by each country (and more 

 especially by individual departments in Great Britain,) in 

 furnishing returns on precisely similar subjects. 



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