IS CRIME INCREASING? 399 



IS CRIME INCREASING? 



THE question whether crime is increasing or decreasing in 

 England and Wales has been the subject of an interesting 

 discussion in The Nineteenth Century between the Rev. William 

 Douglas Morrison, chaplain to the prison at Wandsworth, and 

 Sir Edmund F. Du Cane. Mr. Morrison remarks upon the incer- 

 titude and diversity of opinion prevailing on the subject as 

 something which it is desirable to clear away, and attributes the 

 perplexity of the public mind in the matter, in the main, to the 

 erratic and haphazard manner in which criminal statistics are 

 frequently handled. One of the most obvious mistakes, and yet 

 one which is frequently committed in dealing with questions of 

 crime, is to draw sweeping inferences from the criminal statistics 

 of a single year, or even of a short series of years. " It has to be 

 remembered that criminal returns are largely affected by the 

 fluctuating conditions of social existence, some of the more im- 

 portant of these being the rise or decay of political or industrial 

 agitation, the ebb and now of commercial prosperity, and, more 

 rarely, the emotions aroused among the population by a state of 

 war. In order as much as possible to neutralize the disturbing 

 effect of these inconstant social factors, it is essential that all sta- 

 tistics relating to crime on which it is proposed to build any gen- 

 eral conclusions should cover a decade at the least, and unless this 

 principle is adhered to misleading ideas are almost certain to 

 arise." Sir Edmund Du Cane thinks that even ten years are 

 hardly a long enough period on which to base correct conclusions. 



In Mr. Morrison's investigation of the subject three methods 

 of treatment present themselves for consideration. The total 

 number of offenses as reported to the police may be taken as a 

 criterion ; or the number of cases tried, both summarily and by 

 indictment ; or the total number of convictions. In order to ap- 

 preciate the movement of crime in all its various aspects, each of 

 these three methods is more or less necessary. 



The returns of the yearly average of trials in the three decades 

 1868 to 1889 reveal an increase from 466,087 in the first decade to 

 701,060 in the third, satisfying Mr. Morrison that the total volume 

 of crime has increased very materially within the period. Among 

 the causes which have fostered this growth, he assigns an impor- 

 tant place to the development of social legislation. Offenses 

 against the Elementary Education Acts alone, he says, " have fur- 

 nished considerably more than half a million cases, and other 

 acts of a like character have produced similar results. But the 

 growth of offenses arising from a continuous widening of the 

 sphere of legislative effort is to some extent counterbalanced by 



