EDUCATION AND CRIME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 176, 11 August 1876, Page 11

EDUCATION AND CRIME.

In out issue of last week we gave an extract from the report of the Victorian Inspector of Prisons, by which it is made clear that a [knowledge of the arts of reading and writing is not in itself a safe-guard against the commission of crime in all cases. Of the persons imprisoned in Victoria during the year 1875, 5904 were able to read and write ; 2536 could read only, and 1719 were totally uneducated. Hard facts for those advocates of secular education, who pretend that a panacea for crime is to be found in a slight acquaintance with letters, and that they only are to be regarded with suspicion, who are unable to spell. Indeed this doctrine is so manifestly false, that although we are ever ready to credit men with honesty, even in cases where we widely differ from their conclusions, we cannot but doubt the sincerity of those who advance it ; for it is contrary to the whole experience of mankind, and hourly meets with the most distinct and striking contradiction. Such a contradiction is that given by the report from which we have above quoted, and if we examine further into the matter, we shall find that a like state of things with that reported of has been found to obtain, or actually does so, in other parts of the world, differing widely in circumstances as well as in position from the colony of Victoria. A. Protestant clergyman, the Rev. R. L. Dabney, D.D., residing in Virginia, United States, has lately published a work on the Public School Question. This work has been .summarised by our able contemporary the ' Brooklyn Catholic Review,' and in support of our opinions, we can do no better than give the following extract from the summary thus made: — "Of that apology for State interference which finds expression in the common formula that " It costs less money to build schoolhouses than jails." Dr. Dabney does not find it difficult to dispose. What, he says, if it turns out that the State's expenditure in schoolhouses is one of the things which necessitates the expenditure in jails 1 The fruits of the system show that such is the result, and hence the plea for the State's intrusion is utterly delusive. The established effect of the kind of education which alone the State can give is to propagate crime. He quotes Sir Archibald Alison as stating that forty years ago two-thirds of the inhabitants of France could neither read nor write, while at the same time education was made almost universal in Prussia by compulsory laws. But, among the reading and writing Prussians, serious

crime, as statistics prove, was at that time fourteen times as prevalent as among the illiterate French. And he says that it has been shown, from the official records of the eighty-six departments of France that the amount of crime has, without a single exception, been in proportion to the amount of scholastic instruction given in each. In Scotland the educated criminals are to the uneducated as four-and-a-half to one. M. De Tocqtteville remarked of the United States that crime increased most rapidly where there was most instruction, a conclusion which Dr. '.Dabney conclusively illustrates by a comparison of Northern and Southern illiteracy with Northern and Southern crime. In 1850, he says, the Northern States, which had all adopted the State school system, had, after allowing for the difference of population, more than six times as many criminals as the " uneducated " South. In the same year " the North was supporting 114,700 paupers, and the North 20,500. The ' unintelligent ' South was something more than four times as well qualified to provide for its own subsistence as the ' intelligent ' North ! But Massachusetts is the native home of the public school in America. In Boston and its .adjacent country the persons in jails, houses of correction or refuge, and in almshouses, bore among the whites the ratio of one to every thirty-four. Among the wretched free blacks it was one to every sixty. In Richmond, the capital of 'benighted' Virginia, the same unhappy classes bore the ratio of one to every one hundred and twelve. Such are the lessons of fact." Indeed, adds Dr. Dabney, it requires nothing but the evidence of one's own eyes to convince any observer that the economical plea for State schools is a delusion. In the South, State schoolhouses were unknown, and consequently jails and penitentiaries were on the most confined and humble scale. The North, studded over with costly public schools, is also covered with jails " even more ' palatial ' in extent and nearly as numerous."