Page:The social and moral elevation of our working classes.pdf/3

 from the Reports of our Inspectors General of Prisons, the intimate connexion which exists between ignorance and crime, and I now beg to draw your attention to some later statistics which exhibit like results. Crime, and social and moral degradation are in intimate relationship. In the Dublin Metropolitan Police Statistical tables for the year ending 31st December, 1855, I find that the number of persons taken into custody during that year, within the district, for every species of offence, was 35,634; of these, 19,025 could neither read nor write; 15,894 could only read and write imperfectly; 644 could read and write well, and only 71 had received a superior education. Of the entire number, 24,188 were summarily convicted; 10,677 were discharged; and 779 committed for trial; of these, only thirteen could read and write well, and but one had received a superior education.

Let us now take the Report of the Inspectors General of Prisons in Ireland, for the year 1855, and we find it presents very similar results. The number of men and women committed to prison for that period was 48,446; of these,

As a large proportion of our criminals are drawn from among our labourers and artizans, and from their children, who constitute a great proportion of the whole, these figures indicate to a great extent, the course we must pursue, if we would socially and morally elevate our working classes. We must educate them, or rather, we must strive to awaken such feelings in their souls, as would induce them to seek for the blessings of education for themselves and their children. Our aspirations for their benefit must be turned in that direction. Our prisons are simply the barometers which indicate the upward or downward tendency of our population; for there is but a small minority of our people brought under the lash of the law. The millions are toiling industriously and honestly to obtain a living; but very few of them take that place, socially and morally, which, as intelligent beings, they ought to occupy in the social scale. To remedy this defect should be the constant aim of those who have any light to shed upon the surrounding darkness.

As our prison population alone affords us the measure of education, in the popular sense of the term, arrived at by our people, and as it is fair to assume from those data that improved intellectual powers do guard men against the tendency to commit crime, and thus prevent their social and moral depression, let us now contrast what we are doing to eradicate ignorance with the efforts made in other lands to guard against this evil. I have not before me, or very accessible at present, any documents showing the state