Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/307

Rh give to its subjects any particular kind or degree of instruction or to withhold it altogether. Such returns are received by the Government of France from its judicial officers, and it is worthy of the consideration of the British Indian Government whether with the above object the returns of crime in this country should be made to include the information which I have indicated.

In the absence of this detailed information we must look at crime and criminals collectively; not at the amount and degree of restraining influences imposed by education on the individual, but at the number of criminals in the mass and the different kinds of crime of which they have been convicted as compared with the amount or proportion of instruction previously ascertained to exist in society within the same local limits. The preceding abstract statement of crimes committed in five different districts during a period of six years affords the means of making this comparison which is attempted in the following table:—

The statement of the population of the four last mentioned districts is derived from Mr. Shakespear’s Police Report of 1824 to which I have had an opportunity of referring in the Judicial Department, and that of the city and district of Moorshedabad is the result of a census made by Mr. Hathorn in 1829. The proportion of the population above 14 years of age to the population below that age has been calculated from the population returns contained in Section XIII. of this Report, and the estimate of the population above 14 is founded on the proportion ascertained by actual census to prevail in one entire thana of each district, and now assumed to prevail in all the thanas of the same district for the purpose of obtaining an approximation to the total adult population. It was necessary to obtain this approximation, first, because the aggregate number of crimes can be correctly compared, not with the total population of the district,