"THE HIGHER WALKS OF CRIME."

Colonist, Volume XLVIII, Issue 11976, 11 July 1906, Page 4

"THE HIGHER WALKS OF CRIME."

"Education is refining our criminals" is the burden of the head constable of Liverpool's annual report. "The burglar avoids violence whenever possible, and choses when occasion offers, more subtle forms of roguery." A newspaper representative held an interview on the subject with a gentleman who was for some years associated with the treatment and care of criminals. "While I have no statistics at hand, " he said, "I am prepared to endorse the conclusion of the head constable of Liverpool. There has certainly been a wide falling off in acts of violence associated with burglary. This cannot be accounted for alone by supposing that all burglars are assuming the role of the gentlemanly 'Eaffles. ' The explanation probably is that many with criminal instincts have chosen the higher walks of crime. Men who fifty years ago would have been common burglars, or highwaymen, to-day are bogus company promoters and genteel frauds of various descriptions. Their profits are enhanced, their dangers diminished; and I have no doubt whateveer that this is one of the fruits of the Board school. An inevitable result of education — especially of that dangerous thing 'a little learning' — is to develop hypocrisy where the moral training is not commensurate with the merely intellectual culture. "I am not prepared with a specific, though I certainly do think that any lessening of the ethical teaching in the country's schools, is to be deplored. This can have but one result, so far as the child born with inherited criminal instincts are concerned. It will launch him upon society better equipped for a life of crime. It will make him sharper and more devisive; it will give intelligence to his fraduulent instincts, and enlarge his radius of practice Sunh criminals are the most dangerous to society, because they are the most insidious. Bill Sikes is to be less dreaded than Kaffles; and the latter is to be less feared than the accomplished scoundrel who lays farreaching plans to swindle a whole community by clever but lying schemes. Oh ! yes. Education has its dark side."