One hundred objections to a Maine law : being a sequel to the 'argument' of the United Kingdom Alliance for the Legislative Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic / by Dr Frederic Richard Lees.

  • Frederic Richard Lees
Date:
1857
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: One hundred objections to a Maine law : being a sequel to the 'argument' of the United Kingdom Alliance for the Legislative Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic / by Dr Frederic Richard Lees. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    IGNORANCE NOT A CAUSE OF CRIME. Of life;”* and that “ Ignorance marks the lowest order of crime [petty larceny] far more than it does the highest ” [crimes against the person]. This agrees with everybody’s knowlege ; for who does not know many very illiterate persons who rank amongst the most honest and virtuous members of society ? Ignorance may keep many men in a certain circle of poverty and temptation, which sometimes results in crime ; but ignorance is never the inciting cause, f Hence many convicts in Australia become excellent citizens—no more inclined to crime than people generally. The Rev. Richard Burnet, Chaplain to the Sussex County Prison, at Lewes, states in the Philanthropist for June 1st, 1857 :—“I have taken our criminal records for the last four years, and subjected them to analysis. The result is, that the excess of readers and writers amongst our graver criminals is increased; it is now more than double the amount found in the lowest class of crime ;— and this, I expect, is a general fact. Such are the facts upon which those will have to reason who would discuss the subject of education in its bearing upon crime. I can see in them neither encouragement for those who hope to check crime by the bare spread of knowlege— secular or religious ; nor discouragement for those who devote their energies and their property to the education of the young—the training of their habits and affections in truth, piety, and love.” Prejudice is-stereotyped, or it woidd long since have given up Education as a panacea for Crime. Home-facts abundantly confute the crotchet. For example,—in Lancashire, in 1845, the ratio of ignorant criminals was 13 per cent more than in Kent ; yet agricultural Kent, with more instruction than manufacturing Lan- caster—it is now as 1 scholar in 8 to 1 in 11—had 7i per cent more crime. Of 1150 boys, received into Parkhurst, only 36 have not been at school at all—700 of them having had an average of nearly four years.J The Governor says of many—“They were truants which shows that the criminal cases are traceable to something earlier than schooling, leading them to undervalue that. Mr C. Pearson, solicitor to the City of London, in his evidence in 1847, before the Lords, says :—“I have been a devoted advocate of education, but I am satisfied that the cause of juvenile crime is not the absence of education” In Miss Carpenter’s book on Re- formatory Schools, pp. 18-19, he says of the juvenile delinquents in Newgate, “ a very large portion of them had received a considerable degree of instruction. ” *Mr Mann has shown, in the Educational Census, p. 32, that ignorance is greater among the population out of prison than among the criminals in. + “If a close, and, with proper allowance for counteracting tendencies, a virtually unvarying correspondence between crime and ignorance could be detected, it would be an unwarrantable, and, we believe, an untrue inference, that the ignorance produced the crime. To prove things to be connected, as cause and effect, something more than •onstant association—which in this case you have not—is needed.—National Review. t See Argument, p. 174. The true causes of Juvenile Delinquency are exhaustively exposed in a short, hut admirable lecturo by Mr Thomas Beoos, F.S.S. (Sold by Tweedie, London.)