Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/416

402 of people who developed the disease and the number who were vaccinated to guard against it. Further than this, the figures given in the article [Mr. Morrison's] compare the three decades beginning in 1860, 1870, and 1880, and show, what is true enough, that the number of inmates of these two classes of institutions has increased in each ten years; but this does not show an increase of convicted or even of potential criminals, but only reminds us that there were comparatively few such schools until the great development of these institutions took place after the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Acts were passed, in 1866, for the purpose of encouraging them, and that advantage has been taken of them with still greater vigor in connection with the Education Acts passed in and since 1870.

"In a similar way the increase in the police force is cited as a proof of the increase of crime. If this view were sound, we should expect to find that when there was no police force at all it was because there was no crime—a paradox which, perhaps, it is not necessary to spend time in refuting. Many years ago no traveler could cross Hounslow Heath, Wimbledon Common, or similar desolate approaches to the metropolis, without a good chance of being robbed. Hanging those who were caught did not check this inconvenience; but at last Sir John Fielding hit upon the idea that it might be prevented, and established the armed horse patrol, which soon put a check on the highwaymen. Their appointment was no sign that highway robbing had increased; it was only a better mode of preventing it. Another most potent mode of preventing crime is by making detection more certain. . . . An increase in the police force, with a view to their greater preventive efficiency, is no more a sign that crime has increased than an increase in the amount spent in drainage and water supply, when towns and localities become alive to their advantage, is a proof of increased unhealthiness in places which have adopted such preventive precautions. If an inquiry into the health of a town was to assume that the increased activity of drainage was a sign of increasing bad health, and was altogether to ignore and pass over the evidence afforded by the improved death-rate and the opinion of the medical men of the town, it would be precisely similar to taking the increased activity in progressive development of these preventive institutions as a sign of increase of crime, omitting altogether any investigation into their effect on the number of the criminal classes or disorderly houses, and ignoring the direct testimony of the police, who must know how these matters stand."

A large proportion of the duties of the police, moreover, have nothing to do with crime. The mere collection of large numbers of people together makes a police necessary without any reference to the crime they actually commit.