A SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF CRIME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 29 December 1876, Page 7

A SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF CRIME.

The prevalence of crime in the United States is startling when statistics are advanced. It has been the boast of New Englandera that their section of country was the most law-abiding in the Union. But Mr. Angell of Boston thinks differently. He read a paper bnfore the Social Science Association, in Saratoga, in which he stated that the proportion of crime to population in Massachusetts, is now thirty-three per cent, more than in Ireland. This votary of social science is not very well posted in criminal statistics A little research -would have convinced him that any comparison between the old Bay State and Ireland would be very odious to the former. Such a comparison would almost justify the conviction that total depravity does exist in the land of the Puritan. There are more murders committed in a single year in the city of Boston than have been conimitted in Ireland during the lapse of the last decade. Robbery is almost unknown. Its people have illustrated in real life what was said in poetry of the Acadian farmers — there are no locks to their doors (or rather, there is little need of them), and " their houses are as open as the hearts of the owners." Every judge in Ireland, during the last year, has been compelled, when he opened the assizes, to express his wonder at the brevity of the docket, and the almost entire absence of great violations of law. No country in the world is more obedient to human law, because no country is more Catholic. This is the secret of morality which Mr. Angell has failed to learn. Had he studied the close connection between the Catholic doctrine and purity of public morals, he would not have been guilty of the ridiculous assertion that " the alarming increase of crime in this country was due to the adulteration of food and drink." According to this enlightened thinker, poor wheat, and coffee that is half chickory fill the jails and crowd the penitentiaries. Unfortunately for this learned theory, some of the most poorly fed nations of the world are the most virtuous, while those countries where the masses have all the comforts of life stand lowest in the scale of morality. These wise men of modern times, who cast religion aside, refuse to consider its beneficial influence upon society and fly to science to guide them, are the blindest fools, by their own showing, on the face of the earth. They are condemned out of their own mouth ; they are the exponents of their own ignorance. Crime increases in this country because all sense of religion, all belief in a divine judgment and eternal punishment of sin is disappearing. Crime increases most rapidly in that part of the country where infidelity is now the popular religion, where Protestantism has reached its last conclusion. The flood, however, is rapidly spreading, and will soon cover the whole country. Mr. Angell has found that Ireland is more free from crime than Massachusetts. He reads the fact, but if he had searched for the cause of the difference, he would have found it, not in the adulteration of food, but in the adulteration of religious doctrine. He would learn a truth, which Yankee school-masters and Yankee school sys • terns nxe trying to expel from the human mind, namely, that morals and religious dogma cannot be separated, and doctrinal errors invariably lead to the total corruption of public and private life. A man of true science would have seen in the comparison which Mr. Angell made, that the Catholic confessional was the only power that could prevent crime and save society. — ' Catholic Advocate.'