CRIMINAL TENDENCIES.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7613, 9 December 1886, Page 2

CRIMINAL TENDENCIES.

Social reformers who devote their attention to criminal statistics have a far greater problem to solve than suggests itself to utterers of glib tvnisms on education, and on the modes of imparting moral teaching to juveniles. The two most serious oases set down for the present sittings of the Supreme Court afford sad instances of the difficulty. In one case Joseph Norilen Bell was charged with a terribly grave offence in relation to public morals, ami in. the other the young man Hill pleaded guilty to serious crimes in relation to property. In both cases the offenders had received excellent educations and full moral training. Hill had been clevev as a schoolboy, both at day and Sunday schools, and had gone from day school to a course at the Wellington College. He then became clerk to the Resident Magistrate's Court at Masterton, and after neayly two years' service ■in that capacity entered the Postal Department. It cannot well be said that he committed crime because he had not been taught better things. In Bell's case the circumstances were movestriking. Theson of a doctor in good practice, the nephew of a clergyman, and himself a student at Glasgow 'College as a young man, he was yesterday found gnilty of a vile offence. At the time the offence was committed he was verger of the Anglican Church at • Woodville, and superintendent of the Sunday school. The children he assaulted were little things entrusted to him to be instructed }n morality mul religion, and the offence he was found gnilty of was committed in the vestry of the church. To say that criminals of the types referred to sin for lack of moral training is worse than idle, as the acceptance of such a farfetched theory is apt to blind reformers to the real causes of crime. The. problem lies far deeper, and probably if it could be solved, it would be found that tendencies to crime, which have been in existence at least as long as history tales us back, and are now neither so pronounced nor so serious as they were 50 years ago, are in great measure based upon physical or mental defects that demand the earnest study of physiologists.