Next, it was said, that education would lay the axe to the root of crime; that ignorance was the parent of vice; and, by diffusing the school-master, you would extinguish the greater part of the wickedness which afflicted society; that the providing of cheap, innocent, and elevating amusements for the leisure hours of the working-classes, would prove the best antidote to their degrading propensities; and that then, and then only, would crime really be arrested, when the lamp of knowledge burned in every mechanic's workshop, in every peasant's cottage. The idea was plausible, it was seducing, it was amiable; and held forth the prospect of general improvement of morals from the enlarged culture of mind. The present generation is generally, it may almost be said universally, imbued with these opinions; and the efforts accordingly made for the instruction of the working-classes during the last twenty-five years, have been unprecedented in any former period of our history. What have been the results? Has crime declined in proportion to the spread of education? Are the best instructed classes the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the Tempter? So far from it, the consequences, hitherto at least, have been melancholy and foreboding in the extreme. The criminal returns of Great Britain and Ireland for the last twenty years, demonstrate that the uneducated criminals are about a third of the whole: in other words, the educated criminals are to the uneducated as two to one.[9] In Scotland, the educated criminals, are about _four times_ the uneducated; in England, just double; in Ireland, they are nearly equal. Nay, what is still more remarkable, while the number of uneducated criminals, especially in Scotland, is yearly diminishing, that of educated ones is yearly increasing.[10] In France, the criminal returns have for long demonstrated that the amount of crime, in all the eighty-four departments of the monarchy, is just in proportion to the number of educated persons which each contains; a fact the more remarkable, as three-fifths of the whole inhabitants of the country have received no education whatever.[11] Of the criminals actually brought before the Courts of Assize, which correspond to our Old Bailey and Circuit Courts, it appears that about four-sevenths are educated, and three-sevenths destitute of any instruction; which gives a greater proportion of criminals to the educated than the uneducated class, as three-fifths of the people are wholly uninstructed.[12] But what is most marvellous of all, the criminal returns of Prussia, the most universally educated country in Europe, where the duty of teaching the young is enforced by law upon parents of every description, and entire ignorance is wholly unknown, the proportion of criminals to the entire population is TWELVE TIMES greater than in France, where education of any sort has