writer, as far as I know, is employed. Does the prisoner see the report? and has he any opportunity of challenging its accuracy? are among the questions that occur to me. No report of the trial is ever published. After a long delay we may, perhaps, see the result in a blue book, with initials for the prisoner's name, and his offence described in vague terms which may mean either a very serious offence or a comparatively trivial one. Yet these sentences are sometimes of the most severe kind, and might cause hostile comments in the press if pronounced by a judge of the High Court on a convicted criminal. This subject might well be dealt with by amendment in Committee.

A provision, worth special notice, is that in the 14th section, which enables the Court of summary jurisdiction, in cases of malicious injury, to assess damages payable by the prisoner to the injured person in addition to a fine or term of imprisonment. The Court is not a very good tribunal for the purpose of assessing damages, but as avoiding the trouble and expense of a second action the provision may, on the whole, be a desirable one. It ought to be made clear, however, whether the damages as well as the fine should be paid in order to escape the alternative imprisonment. I presume not; for the prisoner may have many debts, and what he owes for damages ought not to obtain a priority over all others, which it will have if it must be paid in order to escape imprisonment. Moreover, while the fine will be remitted on completing the term of imprisonment, the damages will still remain due. Compensation should never be treated as a punishment for a crime, but our Courts of summary jurisdiction possess certain powers in civil as well as in criminal cases, and the nature of the transaction may be such as to render it convenient that both the civil and the criminal actions should be dealt with by the same Court at the same time. In Ireland the County Court Judge is the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and the

result seems satisfactory. Though the Bill is susceptible of considerable improvement, it would, however, prove useful, even if passed in its present form, and I hope it will escape the massacre of the innocents in a Session in which the innocents are likely to have rather a hard time of it. There is a schedule containing a new table of Court fees which will in future be uniform. Its main provisions will extend, with certain modifications, to Scotland and Ireland.

LEX.

III.-JUDICIAL STATISTICS, ENGLAND AND WALES, 1912.

PART I.-CRIMINAL STATISTICS.1

TATISTICS of any kind are generally dull reading, and

STAT

the halo of romance with which the criminal is sometimes adorned in the popular imagination is rather dimmed when his exploits (and the penalty paid for them) are merely recorded in more or less precise figures. But though the volume which has just appeared, containing the Criminal Statistics for 1912, is in substantially the same form as its predecessors since 1893, it gains an additional interest from two factors. It is the twentieth issue since the Statistics were revised and re-arranged by a Departmental Committee in 1892; and it contains two new Tables (No. XLII and XLIIA), giving particulars of persons sentenced to preventive detention under Part II of the Prevention of Crime Act 1908. Where sentences of preventive detention had been imposed since the Act came into operation on 1st August, 1909, the fact had been noted in previous years in the Tables showing the result of proceedings at Assizes and Quarter Sessions; but it was not until 1912 that any of the

1 Judicial Statistics, England and Wales. Part I.-Criminal Statistics. London: Wyman & Sons. 1914.

prisoners so sentenced became "ripe" for transfer to detention, the Act providing that they must previously have served a sentence of at least three years' penal servitude, with or without the appropriate amount of remission obtainable under the Prison Rules. It is obviously impossible to draw any inferences from the figures for one year only, but it is perhaps worth noting that out of 89 persons sentenced as habitual criminals during 1912, no less than 79 received the minimum terms, viz., three years' penal servitude to be followed by five years' detention; and that at the end of the year the total number undergoing detention imposed by the Courts1 was 117, of whom 103 had been awarded the minimum term.

Of more immediate and general interest, however, are the Comparative Tables appearing at the beginning of the statistics, of which the first five now contain a survey of the state of crime during the last twenty years. While examining the figures for 1912, therefore, it will be well to try and form some estimate of the fluctuations which have taken place in the totals of the more important crimes during this period; and for this purpose the number of persons tried for indictable offences may properly be taken as affording a fairly trustworthy index. Those tried in Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions are given in Table A, those tried Summarily in Table B, the whole being summarised in Table AB.

The total number of persons brought to trial for such offences in 1893 was 57,357, and from that date there was a practically continuous, but not uniform, decrease for the next six years. The greatest reduction occurred between 1894 and 1895, when the numbers diminished by over 5,000, and the slight tendency to rise which appeared in 1898 was more than counterbalanced by a fall of 2,000 odd in 1899,

1 There were also two convicts part of whose sentences of penal servitude had been commuted to preventive detention under sect. 12.

when the lowest figure of the whole period under review was reached, viz., 50,494. Six years later the total, which had been steadily advancing, for the first time exceeded 60,000, and since then it has only just fallen below that figure once (in 1906, when it was 59,079) and has generally far surpassed it, the records of 68,116 and 67,530 standing to the credit-. or discredit-of the years 1908 and 1912 respectively. It is true that since 1893 the population of the country is estimated to have increased by roughly seven millions, and that a Table given in the Introduction to the Statistics shows a decrease in the proportion of offenders from 1927 to 1848 per 100,000. Yet, whatever comfort it may be possible to extract from these calculations, the somewhat disquieting fact remains that in 20 years the number of persons tried for indictable offences has grown by over 10,000, and they are believed to be a fair criterion of the amount of criminality in the country.

By far the greatest part of this increase is contributed by offences against property without violence, the total to be added under this head alone being 7,297; and of this figure almost 6,500 are accounted for by simple larceny and minor larcenies, the actual numbers of these offences in 1893 and 1912 being 40,444 and 46,923 respectively. Obtaining money and goods by false pretences shows an advance of 1,300 odd, and larceny by servants has increased by 900; in fact, the only offence in this class which has substantially diminished is larceny from the person, i. e., pocket-picking, which has fallen fairly steadily since 1893 and is now apparently less than half as prevalent as it was then, the actual figures being 3,993 and 1,685 respectively. Even the number of such larcenies known to the police during 1912 was only 2,581, as appears from Table XXII in the annual tables, and this decrease is at first sight a little difficult to account for. No doubt the number of persons who had their pockets picked somewhat exceeds the total

of offences reported to the police; in most cases it would be futile to give information of the loss of money which it would be quite impossible to trace unless the sum were very considerable. But this factor is not a new one, and the decrease in this sort of crime should probably be attributed to the difficulty involved in committing it, which would make success possible only for the expert with a clever accomplice to cover his movements. If this view is right, it would seem to indicate a decrease in the class of professional criminals, their place being taken by amateurs to whom such offences as shop-breaking would not present the same difficulty.

The latter class of offence has, in fact, increased enormously, the figures for 1893 and 1912 being 676 and 1,802 respectively; and the total of offences against property, with violence, has almost doubled (from 2,202 to 4,077). Sacrilege, burglary and housebreaking have remained almost stationary for the last five years, though again the figures have largely increased during the last 20 years-sacrilege from 26 to 53, burglary from 501 to 668, and housebreaking from 465 to 964. But as a set-off it is satisfactory to note that robbery and assaults with intent to rob have diminished by one-half, and it is to be hoped that this downward trend will continue, and that this form of crime will not be encouraged by the fact that only one-sixth of the persons convicted of it in 1912 received sentences of penal servitude. The remaining indictable offences do not show nearly such a marked variation, partly because their number is small compared with those that have already been referred to and partly because some of them have in fact remained almost stationary. Sexual offences of all kinds have rather gone up (the latest total being 1,781 as against 1,231), while other offences against the person have generally diminished—from 1,559 to 1,431. But, as is pointed out in the Introduction, the figures for sexual offences do not necessarily indicate an