Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/341

Rh with the material environment; hence the average of crime and vice is shown by the table to be relatively low.

The Rev. F. H. Wines, statistician and philanthropist, who has made questions of crime and criminals the study of a lifetime, was selected by the authorities at Washington to compile the statistics bearing on delinquents in the tenth census; and after a careful study of the mass of figures returned, but few of which appear in the compendium, he makes this very remarkable statement concerning the facts collected and enumerated: "If a comparison is made between offenses against public morals and against public peace, the smallest amount of disorder and the largest of immorality, relatively, are found among the native whites, the most disorder and least immorality among the negroes; and the foreigners occupy a middle ground between the two." ("American Prisons in the Tenth Census," "Proceedings of the National Prison Association for 1888," p. 268.) When it is realized that the native whites represent the better educated portion of our population, and the negroes the more illiterate, while the foreigners are on an educational scale between the two, the significance of the statement can neither be gainsaid nor belittled.

We are, then, confronted by facts which reveal a condition of decreasing illiteracy and increasing crime, of augmenting wealth with more wide-spread destitution. While inventors and engineers have united continents by steamship lines and cables, States by telegraph and railway lines, and cities by bridges, statesmen have vainly sought to unite the interests of employers and employe's, of railway managers and shippers, of producers and consumers; and every legislative measure intended to harmonize the interests of these conflicting elements has given rise to greater irritation and more complicated evils.

Since the record of material progress and mechanical construction has been one of unvarying certainty and triumph, while legislation has so often led to failure in the investigation of this educational problem, will it not be well to reject the hap-hazard devices of the legislator, and confine ourselves to the scientific methods so successfully employed by the constructing engineer and mechanical inventor? Take, for illustration, the history of Bessemer steel railway-bars. The introduction and use of these bars for our railway-tracks so cheapened the cost of transportation that it made possible the development of the far Western States and Territories, which find themselves enabled to profitably market produce thousands of miles away.

Twenty years ago, under a traffic which constituted but a small fraction of the mileage which the same roads are performing to-day, iron rails became worn down and laminated with such rapidity that the cost of track repairs was enormous, and it