the last vestige of the self-government from which it sprang, is to be inquired into.

There has been a political revolution, that is clear; in the old days men who were suitors to the County Court, or on the burgess roll, represented the communities in Parliament. There has been an agricultural revolution, when first the villein went, and then the yeoman, and finally the commoner, till scarcely a poor man had right on a foot of English soil. Yet, further, there has been an industrial revolution, where invention, as it were, added in substance the labour of another world to aid the industry of England.

And yet to-day there is deep social discontent; we stand by central law, and every man can tell of wrongs for which there is no redress, since no law has been passed to meet the case. For instance, in mediæval days the wife had right to dower; to-day, twenty-four hours before natural death, or perhaps an hour before self-inflicted death, a man may beggar wife and children. It goes without saying he may beggar them in his lifetime, or may make a will of which none know the contents. In local matters schemes are hurried through without the ratepayers having any voice at all. Farms may be left derelict, or an industry closed down, and all those who are the descendants of the men who held the industrial Courts can do is to look on helplessly. There needs to be done for modern England, and indeed for modern Europe, what medieval England did: to have Courts of conscience, or, in another form, the perpetual edict of the Prætor, to restore to the people themselves in free assemblies the management of the complex and ever-changing affairs of life, and to make representative institutions, not the masters of modern life, but their servants as they used to be, while the king's justices see to it that no one acts against the king's peace, and that no group of workers or citizens go beyond their warrant. "On the foundation of peoples empires rest," said the Bishop of

Bayeux, when England was about to lose the realm of France; it might be said that on the foundation of the people social justice rests, when social peace seems at stake; and his words of warning are as true to day as they were in the 15th century: "All breadth and glory of empires have risen from justice; nor is there any power of empire so great that without justice it can be lasting; it is not sufficient to preserve the heights of greatness if the foundations are overturned."

KENELM D. COTES.

THE

V.-CRIMINAL STATISTICS, 1910.1

HE modern tendency to social introspection has not allowed the problem of crime to escape attention, and numerous volumes have been and continue to be produced dealing with the question in various aspects. It touches social life at so many points, that great diversities of treatment are only to be expected, and indeed they are as numerous as theories of the State. Crime is a symptom of disorder in the body politic, and it is therefore inevitable that every writer on the subject must reveal-consciously or unconsciously—his views of society as a whole, when discussing crime in particular. There are two extreme views which may be held. On the one hand, you may regard the criminal as personally and individually responsible for his crime, taking little or no account of his environment: this is the direction in which writers tend who lay stress on individuality. On the other hand, you may regard the criminal as the product of his surroundings, attaching little or no importance to his own character; this is the direction taken by writers

1 Judicial Statistics, England and Wales, 1910. Part I. Criminal Statistics. London: Wyman & Sons.

1912.

who are impressed by the influence on the individual of his environment. Between these extremes there are a host of gradations, and the question, "What is crime?" could be made the opportunity for an endless series of rhetorical questions after the manner of Mr. Chadband.

It is interesting, for example, to observe in a recent novel, "The Daughters of Ishmael," which deals temperately with the white slave question in New York, how the writer inclines to exculpate from serious moral responsibility all and everyone concerned in this traffic. The novel was no doubt inspired by the Report of the Additional Grand Jury of the Court of General Sessions in the County of New York, which enquired into the white slave traffic and reported in June, 1910. The report contains the following passage," All must agree that the man who in cold blood exploits a woman's body for his own support and profit is vile and despicable beyond expression. Only through the arousing of an intelligent and determined public sentiment, which will back up the forces of law in their effort to ferret out and bring to justice the members of this debased class, is there hope of stamping out those vilest of human beings found to-day in the leading cities of this and other lands." Yet, in dealing with the procurer depicted in the novel, the author writes: "A wiser head and an unwounded heart would have known enough of life to see that even Max Crossman was not entirely to blame. A better brain could have looked back into the past. It could have seen Max as the type of all his kind, the symbol of every one of the great company of slavers, the inevitable result of a system blind both to its own interests and to the interests of the race." After describing the course of the life of a child neglected at home, shaped by "the social order" into "society's enemy," he proceeds: "It could have seen the fatal line of least resistance as clearly in the resultant man as it is seen in the life of him that does no more than

wreck a bank or steal a corporation; and, hideous as its course is in the one instance, it would have seen that the line was the same in all." To another current writer, such a view savours of mischievous cant. "It does not need to be repeated at this time of day that environment is one of the factors in the development of character, and that a humane Legislature will not spare efforts to improve the conditions of life for the masses of poor people among whom criminals are generally bred. But it does need to be repeated that when all allowance is made for heredity, for education, for circumstance, there remains the inscrutable personality of a man, which is responsible for his acts, which deserves praise or blame, reward or punishment."

These quotations from current writings show clearly that any attempt to solve the problem of crime involves the deeper problems of the structure of society, and of freewill. Its complexity may be illustrated by a reference to Table XXXVIII of the present volume of statistics, showing the state of instruction and previous occupations of prisoners received in prison on conviction. The total number so received was 168,260, of whom 132,221 were males and 36,039 females. Of this total, 21,890 were illiterate; 68,877 could read and write imperfectly; 69,555 were moderately proficient in reading and writing; 6,996 could read and write well; 363 were classified as having had superior instruction. These figures show that more than one-third of convicted prisoners were only of such education as is given in Standards I and II,1 and that more than another third were only of the level of Standards III and IV, and that more than one-eighth were illiterate. The percentage of those who could read and write well is very

1 For the purpose of this table, the standards of education, so far as relates to reading and writing, are grouped thus:-Standards I and II read and write imperfectly; Standard III and IV= read and write with moderate proficiency.

small-roughly, 4 per cent.

These are arresting results,

and at first sight it might be supposed that crime is a result of defective education, and that a true causal connection is revealed. But there are other considerations to be borne in mind, as was pointed out recently in a letter to the Westminster Gazette, in which statistics were given as to the state of education of prisoners tried at the London Sessions during the last few months. Thus, it is no doubt the case that the same causes which operate to prevent the boy from rising to the higher standards operate to prevent him from being a law-abiding member of society-lack of moral fibre, inattention, and so on. Or again, defective control at home, leading to carelessness at school or to irregular attendance, leads to lack of supervision when the boy leaves school, and consequent drifting into bad ways. Still there remains the reassuring fact that the higher the degree of education the less is the per-centage of crime among persons of that degree.

It is not however the purpose of this article to discuss theories of crime, and we may now turn to the current volume of statistics.

Offences are divided, as usual, into three main classes: indictable offences, criminal non-indictable offences, and other non-indictable offences. The first-class is plain, including all the offences for which a man has a right to trial by jury; the second includes offences which involve some element of dishonesty, fraud, violence or cruelty; the third includes all the minor offences known to the law. The number of persons tried for the first of these three classes of offences is generally used as the most reliable index to the volume of crime; and it includes, of course, not merely the cases actually tried on indictment, but also the indictable cases tried summarily. In 1910 this number was 66,389. For 1909 and 1908 the corresponding figures were 67,150 and 68,116. There is therefore a diminution for 1910.