THURSDAY, JULY 2, 1903. ROMANISTS' AND 'CRIMINALS'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 27, 2 July 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, JULY 2, 1903. ROMANISTS' AND 'CRIMINALS'

fAST week we exploded a few dynamite cartridges in an unwarranted statement made by a nonCatholic clergyman in the columns of a Palmerf ston florth contemporary. 'The Romanists of I^'ew Zealand,' said this wholesale enthusiast, i 'have a larger percentage of criminals than the I Protestants, who give their children the Bible.' We have already snivered to pieces two fallacies that underlie this sweeping statement. Several others remain. It seems clear that our reverend critic has neither examined the subject for himself nor remembered the simpe eleme nta of logical deduction that, it is to be hoped, formed a part of his training for the sacred ministry. For his fal\acies are, in their way, of as flagrant a kind as the sa mple given in old John Lilburne's treatise on logic : * '1 hat creature which has two legs before, and two legs behind, and two legs on each side, has eight legs ; but a fox is a creature with two kga before and two legs behind, and two legs on each side ; therefore a fox has eight legs.'

The use of words of vagne or ambiguous meaning affords the readiest and most welcome wriggl ing-ground for the man with a weak case. Hence sharp, clear, right definition of terms is the first, second, and third condition of right discussion. In the present' instance the vital word is 1 criminals.' Incidently, we may remark that ' crime ' is a

slipshod term. It it used in law as a loose generic term equivalent to ' offence.* Bat to this hour the law has been unable to fix its meaning by a definition. It is, however, as true now as it was in the days of Hobaob and QunmxJAH that received custom determines the tense of words and ii the surest director of the right use or speech. And in the ordinary and accepted use of the word, a crime is a »ervnt* offence tending to the prejudice of th*> community. The same holds good with regard to the French, Italian, and Spanish terms ' crime,* * crimine,' and ' crimen.' The word ' criminals,' now nnder discussion, is not, so far as we an aware, an accepted term in lav. 1(8 received meaning, however, admits of no dispute. In Obabb's standard wofk, ' English Synonyms,' for instance, we read :- ' Those only are denominated criminal who offend seriously, either against publio law or private morals.' And he defines a * criminal * as * . . . one who has committed some great offence against law, duty, or right.' And this grave kind of wrongdoing is precisely what general usage associates with the words * criminals,' * criminal classes,' < criminal popoitr tion.' Ceabb, for instance, sets down mere drunkenness, not as a crime, but as a vice. Mr. John MaoDohkxll, who is the author of the interesting preface to the Prisons Reports for England and Wales for the year 1901, does not regard drunkenness and petty brawling as « crimes* nor those guilty of them as ' criminals.' And Mr. Hatter, the statistician of the Victorian Government, ranks drunkenness, assault, and large classes of indictable offences against property, good order, and the public welfare as only * minor offences hardly amounting to crimes.' All such offences *of inferior degree ' are unknown in law as ' misdemeanors ' (and in a loosely generic and improper way as * crimes *). It is the other two divisions of evil-doing — treasons and felonies — that are ' crimes ' in the trne and accepted meaning of the woid. And the vastly greater part of those at whom the over-enthusiastic cleric in Palmerston North flung the term 1 criminals ' are not criminals, but mere misdemeanants.

• When the old warrior Ossian was in a fighting mood he called on his bard to sing him ' a song— a Bong with a sword in every line.' When our combative critic in Palmerston North took down his harp and sang his statistical roundelay, he managed to pack into it a fallacy for every word. We will do him the credit of supposing that his statement us to the relative number of ' Romanist criminals ' is based on the statistical returns of ' law and crime. 1 There is no little significance in the fact that, thongh ronndly challenged, he made no attempt to sustain his unsupported assertion by adequate, or any, proof. The false and unwarranted assumptions and other fallacies that lurk in his quoted statement are worthy of a Jourdain or a Justice Shallow. Here are a few of them : (1) He tacitly draws and conveys the double-barrelled inference that the alleged higher criminality of our Catholic population is due to this — that they do not 'give their children the Bible.' (2) He confounds misdemeanants with criminals. (3) His assertion assumes that all the criminals in New Zealand are duly caught, ticketed, and entered up. (4) He takes it for granted that a proper and correct record is kept of the religious beliefs of all the criminals in the country. (1) To his doublebarrelled fallacy we make a double-barrelled reply : (a) His inference that there is no Bcripture instruction in our schools is simply opposed to fact. Bible history, etc., is a part of their curriculum, and the Catholic faith, which is instilled into the minds of our children, is the living and magnificent embodiment of the whole Word of God. (b) If his argument, as stated by him, were of any use, it would have a general application. In that case his native Scotland, would be one of the model countries of Europe, and Ireland — which gave New Zealand the overwhelmingly greater part of its Catholic population — would be a warning example of criminality to the nations of the earth. Bat what are the facts ? Scotland is certainly not a model to the nations. It stands far ahead of Ireland in the number of its ' criminals. 1 In the matter of illegitimacy — an important test of the moral stamina of a people — Scotland is (as the British Registrar-General showed) three times worse than Ireland as a whole — and this although Ireland has to bear the overwhelming burden of the sins of the north-eastern and lodge-ridden corner of Ulster. In 1896 Mr. Tighs Hop-

kins—no friendly critic, by the way—writing on 'Kilmainham Memories ' in the Windsor Magazine, says that 'crime,' as known in the sister kingdoms, is practically non-existent in Ireland. ' Our great guilds of crime— the bands of professional burglars and robbers; the financial conspirators ; the adept forgers ; the trained thieves ; the habitual leviers of blackmail ; the bogus noblemen, parsons, and ladies of family ; the " long-firm " practitioners ; the hotel and railway sharps; the "magsmen," "hooks," " bounces " — these are almost unrepresented in Ireland. In a word,' concludes Mr. Hopkins, ' so far as habitual and professional crime is concerned, there is not as decent a country in Europe. 1 And the trade in white gloves, assizes after assizes all over Ireland, goes to show that this admission of an unfriendly critic is well grounded in fact.

(2) Again : the Palmerston cleric's quoted statement ndiscriminately lumps misdemeanants as * criminals.' And his thesis requires that he shall deal only with * criminals ' properly so-called. The overwhelmingly greater number of offences dealt with in our courts are in law petty offences or misdemeanors. The one item of over - indulgence in strong drinks represented for instance, no fewer than 8120 out of the 20,624 summary convictions in the Magistrates' Courts in New Zealand during the year 1901. (3) Our critic also assumes that all the criminals of the Colony are duly caught, convicted, and entered up in statistical returns. But nothing is farther from the truth. Statistics, in New Zealand as in Great .Britain and elsewhere, do not represent even the actual amount of serious crime known to the police. The majority of burglaries and homicides, for instance, are not cleared up. It is difficult to sheet home great numbers of crimes, such as pre-natal murder and other forms of infanticide. Whole classes of frauds and swindles and breaches of trust never come before the courts, owing to the cost and trouble of instituting law proceedings. And for analogous reasons, coupled with the difficulty of detection, many grave crimes against morality never figure in our criminal courts. (4) Lastly, our northern critic assumes that a proper and correct record is kept of the religious beliefs of all the criminals in the country. This is undue assumption with a vengeance, (a) !n the first place, as stated above, the roll of our criminals is far from complete, (b) In the second place all convicted criminals are not required to make a statement of their religious beliefs, bnt only those that are sent to prison. And (c) it is, we believe, the experience of every priest who hag been engaged in prison work in these countries — as we were for a time in three separate places — that many non-Catholic criminals have the habit of giving themselves Irish ' aliases ' and falsely designating themselves as Catholic. The case of the Williamstown murderer (who was a non-Catholic Sunday-school teacher) furnished a notable case in point, and the Melbourne Advocate and the Adelaide Southern Cross have exposed other flagrant instances of the kind from time to time. This is a matter which urgently calls for vigilant and emphatic action on the part of our reverend clergy.

Our prison statistics, theiefore — which alone give the religious beliefs of offenders — furnish no evidence whatever for the assertion that that ' the Romanists of New Zealand have a far larger percentage of criminals than the Protestants, who give their children the Bible.' The presumption, in fact, favors a very opposite conclusion— namely, that the 4 Bomanists' do not furnish as large a percentage of criminals as the adherents, or nominal adherents, of other denominations. And this presumption is based by us on two facts : (a) the lesser relative number of criminals among the Irish people (who form by far the greater part of the New Zealand Catholic population) in their home-land (as shown above) ; and (b) their lesser relative number of criminals in Victoria, where they live in practically the same conditions as in this Colony. We have not the latest figures before us, but Mr. Hayter, the Victorian Government statistician, in a work published some yeara ago, bears abundant witness to the fact that the Irish population of Victoria furnished a far lesser number of criminals — or perBons guilty of offences of ' a serious nature ' — than the English or the Welsh, and that their misbehavior consisted almost altogether of * minor offences, hardly amounting to crimes.' '1 he published returns of ' law and crime '

do not furnish the faintest shadow of evidence that a differentiate of thinga prevails among the Irish or Catholic population of New Zealand. If our Palmerston North absailant has any faith in gaol statistics as conclusive evi•?i°c °I the number of ' criminals ' to each denomination, he will find a nut to crack in the latest "report of the Prison Commissioners for Scotland. It shows that our critic's native land has more than twice as many committals to prison as England, and nearly twice as many as Ireland, where Coercion Acts and an outrageously hostile and meddling garrison of armed police turn into ' crimes ' large classes of actions that in other countries would not rise to the level of misdemeanors.

But our prison statistics furnish no reliable evidence even as to the number of misdemeanants or petty offenders for which the colony, or any given religious denomination in it, is responsible. (1) Over the published tables of Maw and crime' it is expressly stated that ' each offence is reckoned as a dtshnct person: Thus, if John O'Dob is * run in ' seven times in one year for over-indulgence in drink, he counts in the statistics as seven separate misdemeanants. (2) Again : great numbers of misdemeanants and others convicted in our magistrates^ courts do not figure in our prison reports because their means allow them to pay fines in cases where the poorer offender has to go into durance vile. Thus, in 1901, out of 20,624 summarily convicted, no fewer than 10,088 were merely fined, and 1,926 were ordered to prison as an alternative to paying a fine or finding security for good behavior. The systematic impoverishment of Irish Catholics by the operation of the penal code and the agrarian laws is responsible for the fact that they furnish an undue proportion to the poorer and poorest pait of the population in these countries. And this circumstance would naturally account for a greater relative frequency of appearance, on their part, on the pages of our prison records. Mulhall, MacDonnell, and statisticians generally acknowledge that petty larceny, drunkenness, and certain allied offences are the outcome of poverty. And the overstrung temperament. -and relative poverty of a great mass of our Catholic people greatly tend to bring their offenders prominently into the public "eye. They drink, for instance, in the open, under the eye of the police, and, in their case, an arrest may be associated wiih three or four separate charges. People of more phlegmatic temperament or fuller purse get drunk, but their offence is unknown to the police records. Probably not two per cent, of the total cases of drunkenness in society figure before our courts. Our statistics of * law and crime ' contain no evidence that offences arising from poverty or low social status are proportionately more numerous among New Zealand Catholics than among persons of the same class that are adherents of other religious denomiations. And we are convinced that in the graver offences that constitute ' criminals '—in murder, suicide; rape, indecent assault, burglary, swindling, infanticide, pre-natal murder, juvenile depravity, flagrant conjugal infidelity, and in other grave infractions of the moral laws of which' God takes note where the policeman and the statistician fail the Catholics of New Zealand would gladly take their chances as against those of all other sections of the community.