Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/338

324 should serve as a salutary warning to those who expect to find in mental stimulation an equivalent for moral growth and culture:

The table unmistakably shows a greater per capita of wealth where the fewest illiterates are enumerated, but it no less clearly shows that this augmentation of riches has been accompanied by increased insanity and crime and more wide-spread vice.

But we need not confine ourselves to the general statistics of the United States, for the records of New York present similar conditions, which can be analyzed more in detail. The "Annual Report of the Superintendent of the New York State Prisons, 1886," records that the prisons of Auburn and Sing Sing contained 2,610 convicts; of these, 1,801 are credited with a common-school education, 373 are classed as being able to read and write, 19 are returned as collegiates, 10 as having received classical and 78 academic educations, 97 as being able to read only, and 238 as having no education. Is it not contrary to our most confident predictions and undoubted expectations that the common schools should furnish eighty-three per cent and the colleges and academies over four per cent of the inmates of Auburn and Sing Sing?

When it is remembered that the detected illiterate generally finds his way to prison, while the highly educated or well-to-do are frequently saved by friends, who compound the felony to escape exposure and consequent family disgrace; that many are saved from conviction by the ability of counsel whose services are far beyond the means of the illiterate poor, while still many others escape into voluntary exile to avoid imprisonment, it will be seen that even the figures given inadequately portray the extent of crime which, in strict justice, is properly chargeable to the educated classes. Of the prisoners of Auburn and Sing Sing it