fourth indirectly, caused by intemperance,"—a total, directly and indirectly, of 75 per cent. Authorities in the United States state that the proportion is much greater than that; and some English authorities place it as high as 90 per cent. How intimately this sin is connected with our own record of crime in Massachusetts, may be inferred from the fact that Maine and Massachusetts have the largest number of saloon-keepers, or liquor-sellers, of all the States in the Union, and New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, the largest number of drunkards! Its prevalence in the country will be realized from the fact that in the 492 towns in the United States having over 5,000 inhabitants each, and a total population of 12,669,181, there is one liquor saloon to every 160 inhabitants. Allowance must be made, of course, for the districts which some of these centres supply; but, after making liberal allowances, Mr. Wines thinks that we shall have one for every 250 adults in the United States. To bring the figures more directly home, Boston had, or was said to have, 2,900 liquor saloons, or I to every 125 persons, in 1886, and one arrest to every twelve and a half individuals; in the country at large there was one arrest for every twenty inhabitants in 1880.

Next to drunkenness as a factor in crime, its progeny, which inherits its baneful habits of lawlessness and dissoluteness, and perpetuates them in ever-increasing ratio, is to be considered. The influence of heredity in multiplying our criminal classes, and in their anatomical, physiological, and mental degeneration, has never been fully comprehended; the instance cited by Dr. Elisha Harris of one Margaret, a pauper, assisted out of house in a New York county, and whose descendants, to the number of two-hundred, have been criminals, and cursed the county ever since, is doubtless but one of thousands of similar instances in which the sowing of the wind produces the whirlwind.

Another important multiplier of crime is the exclusively intellectual character of our present system of education; to repeat a remark of Locke, which is as true to-day as when he made it, our "schools fit us for the university rather than for the world." Neglecting, not without an assumption of superior knowledge, the traditions which still surround us of an education which was perfect in its adaptation of means to the end, and in which our Puritan and Pilgrim fathers had anticipated Rousseau, that great apostle of educational reform, we have declared that, as the intellectual faculties are superior to and dominate all others, they alone shall be culti

vated, to the exclusion of the body and in forgetfulness of their inter-dependence. With the same fatuity, want of foresight, and indifference to the true purpose of education,-the development of all the powers of body and mind,-we have decreed the exclusion of religious and manual training, and the neglect of those faculties which are most potent in the formation and determination of a broad, stable, and upright character. I am speaking of a "system," the scheme of our education as a whole, and not of the few exceptions, by which the iron rule is only made more prominent.

We cannot but confess that the Roman Church, in asserting that religion is the foundation of all true education, has reason, philosophy, and history behind it. It is no new discovery; it is the rock upon which our Republic was built, and which was once acknowledged in Church and State and school. President Dunster, in laying the foundations of our oldest and greatest university, declared, in his rules and precepts, that "Christ must be laid in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning." The mistake of the Roman Catholics is that, as members of a government whose cardinal principle is perfect religious freedom, and which guarantees equal rights to all sects, they insist upon the teaching of religious dogmas, and are intolerant of any teaching which seems to controvert them, however unsectarian that teaching may be, a position which is neither philosophical nor just. The religion of Christ is, fortunately, not confined and limited to the narrow field enclosed by the dogmas of any particular sect. Man, as Pauliat says, " is a religious animal," and, for his proper sustenance and complete development, must have food for that special function of the spirit and anchor to his passions; if that food cannot be had at home, and the Church fails to reach him, the school must furnish it; there is no other alternative. It is claimed that this religious, moral, and physical development is attained, sensibly or insensibly, under our present system and curriculum, and that there is no need of or call for special instruction. Let the present deficient moral sense, the criminal tendencies, as shown in our statistics, and the physical degeneration of our youth, be a sufficient refutation of that claim.

Still another factor in the increase of juvenile crime is the egoism, the false conceptions of life, the sharpness (miscalled shrewdness), the aversion to labor, the disregard of authority, the shallowness, the conceit, the scepticism, resulting not alone from

the prominence given to intellectual culture, but from our neglect to give the great majority of our school population, who graduate at about the age of fourteen, an hour's instruction as to their own civil rights and the duties owing to themselves, to society, and to the government which guarantees those rights, and of which they are a part. Egoism and an imperfect moral sense are the foundation stones of a criminal career. Says a writer in The Summary:

"I have met a great many criminals, but never more than two or three who had anything like a proper appreciation of their true relations to others, or of their own and others' rights and duties. . . . It is a startling fact that the average criminal has hardly any clearer conception of his own position and of his actual relations to society than the average lunatic. . . . The basis of criminal action is egoism. It is egoism that prevents the criminal from properly estimating his own limitations and the rights of others in property, and it is egoism that blinds his mental perception and leaves him a prey to all manner of silly conceits and fancies regarding his own condition and power."

Do we need a stronger argument than this for the immediate introduction into the curriculum of our grammar-schools of suitable textbooks of instruction in the elements of civics, which shall teach in a concrete form the important truth that we are members one of another?

One other important cause of crime is a deficiency of the logical faculty-the incapacity to reason inductively. This factor is particularly conspicuous in our negro population. Mr. Wines estimates that the percentage of the colored population in prison is two-anda-half times as great as that of the whites, being for the latter 964 to the million, and for the former 2,480 to the million; the tendency manifested by them to commit crimes against property is 50 per cent. greater than among the native white population. The ratio would be much more strikingly against the negro, if his crimes, particularly those of passion, were discovered, or more frequently prosecuted, when discovered; there is a notorious laxity in prosecutions for crime in sections remote from large centres of population, and especially is it the case where the negro is in a majority. Mr. Wines is right in attributing the notorious disregard of the negro for the rights of property, in a measure, to his previous condition of slavery; but it will not fully account for his criminal character a quarter of a century after his emancipation. The negro has little inclination for, and small ability in, drawing conclusions from premises, or of connecting effects with causes. This observation is confirmed by the experience of Dr. Wey, of the Elmira State Reformatory, New

York, with criminals of all classes. He says: "The average criminal displays a remarkable ignorance of the science of numbers, other things being equal; as if there is in his composition a deficiency of logical, deductive, and analytical power." Unfortunately for the negro, this mental defect is a racial one.

I have no space to mention, except incidentally, a few of the secondary or subsidiary and accidental causes of crime. Prominently among these we place the popular fallacy on which we have based our educational system, that intellectual culture prevents crime. Experience, observation, history and statistics, prove the contrary overwhelmingly.

An exceptional cause of crime by which we have suffered during the last thirty years, and which no doubt has had an important influence in raising the ratio of crime, by disturbing our moral balance, is the War of the Rebellion.

I suggest as a cause not too indirect, the prominence given, in our modern culture, to the understanding, at whose bar every other faculty of the mind, every generous impulse of the heart, in abject servitude, is forced to appear and prove its right to exist. Of the tyranny of this faculty it has been pithily said, "The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty of the human mind."

Among the youth, an ever-active motive to crime is the glamour and romance too frequently thrown about it in the periodical literature of the day; the scandalous and depraved character of the heroes and heroines of the popular novel; the glorification by the theatre of morbid and sensual appetites and passions; and other similar influences which are too well known to require repetition.

All these, and many other influences, motives, and causes, have produced a social condition portrayed by M. Caro. "I asked," he says, "a young romancer, already celebrated, why we encountered in his books so few honest men. 'It is,' said he, 'because I have encountered so few in life; virtue has become tiresome as a thesisit is no longer la mode."" For our latitude, this may be at the moment a slight exaggeration; but it will be apparent to every observer that we are rapidly approaching the time when it can as truly be said of our own as of the French society of the present decade.

GEORGE R. STETSON.

THE EDUCATION OF THE MASSES.

THE Americans, as a nation, have but recently awakened, in any degree, to the fact that education is something more than a matter of routine; that the understanding of a child cannot be properly developed by mere rule-of-thumb methods. Excellent as many of our schools have been, and conspicuous as the exceptions to general systems of teaching have stood out, the appreciation of a necessity for something in education beyond the simple imparting of information, has scarcely entered the mind of the average American. This century has produced great men and great minds. So will all epochs and all countries, be the conditions never so adverse. Better or worse methods of general education do not materially affect either their number or their quality. Rules and systems are not for them: they make their own paths, levelling mountains and bridging abysses, if need be, to clear the way to their appointed goal. In the exceptional man, the genius, public education is not interested. The slowly-plodding millions, without fame, almost without identity, must, however, be provided for; and with their training, their uplifting, the State and the Nation are deeply and seriously concerned.

Especially difficult has the problem become since the beginning of the enormous influx of foreign population. So peculiar were the conditions of the settlement of America, so thoroughly were the selection of the fittest to survive, and the destruction of the cripples and drones, brought about by the extraordinary difficulties surrounding existence in the New World, and-in the North, at least-by the rigid public sentiment of the Puritan, that the first settlers and their immediate descendants exhibited native vigor of mind and body that needed no spur to be progressive. Our forefathers improved themselves and their surroundings with a rapidity almost unparalleled. The demon of work within them planned and builded and wrought with giant strength, and founded a nation wonderfully vigorous in body and in the ruder qualities of mind, but deficient in many of the finer senses and perceptions. Proper and necessary as ' is such thorough physical building-up, speedy as is the ruin of a State