Our Criminal Classes. 
By Henry Kirke, M.A., B.CL., Oxon.; Sheriff of Demerara. 
RIMES are serious offences punishable by the 
laws of a community, and are not to be, as 
they often are, confounded with sins. A sinner 
is one who breaks the laws of God, or rather those laws 
as interpreted by the particular religious sect to which 
he belongs. Bigamy is both a crime and a sin in England, 
but in Mahommedan countries it is a virtuous condition 
of life. Adultery in England is a sin but not a crime, 
whereas by Hindu law it is both. 
Criminals are persons who break the public laws of 
the country in which they reside or of the community to 
which they belong, so that any person residing in British 
Guiana, from whatever country he may have come, is 
liable to punishment for a breach of the laws of the 
colony, even although he may be entirely ignorant of 
those laws, and had been brought up under a system 
entirely different. It is this ignorance which leads to a 
class of crime amongst our East Indian immigrant popu- 
lation to which I shall refer later on. 
Without law there can be no crime, so in those coun- 
tries where civilization has reached its highest perfection 
and where innumerable industries and luxuries require 
proportionately numerous laws for their protection and 
development, we should expect to find the greatest 
