There has been a steady decline in the prison population in England and Wales in the last ten years. During the year which ended on March 31 last there were fewer commitments in those parts of Great Britain than in any previous year covered by statistical records. According to the deductions made by the editor of The Lancet from the annual reports of the Commissioners of Prisons and Directors of Convict Prisons, this condition of affairs is to be attributed to several causes: The present higher standard of conduct, a more humane tendency in society, general prosperity, and a wider choice of alternative penalties. “In any moral inquisition,” says the editor, “such as is generally regarded as one of the most important functions of statistical inquiry in the modern state, it is natural that a special degree of interest should attach to the statistics of criminality. These statistics seem at first sight to offer a direct and positive measure of the moral health of the community: and the assumption that they have this significance is in fact so commonly made by popular opinion that any considerable oscillation in their movement is usually interpreted without further question as an index of a corresponding change in public morals. “In connection with criminality, however, there is even more need than in the case of other social phenomena to bear in mind the proverbial limitations of statistical evidence, especially when drawn from a limited area or when they refer wholly to some single one among the many aspects of this complex question. “It may be useful to recall these qualifying considerations in judging of the real significance of the remarkable decline in the prison population, to which attention is specially drawn in the latest annual report of the Commissioners of Prisons and Directors of Prisons. From that report it appears that during the year ended March 31, 1913, the number of commitments to prison in England and Wales was lower than in any year of which there is statistical record. Moreover, as the commissioners show by a comparative table giving the numbers of the prison population over a series of years, this shrinkage is not due to any sudden and exceptional causes operative within the last twelve months, but is, on the contrary, a continuation of a downward movement which has been evident throughout the last decade. “Obviously, this steady diminution in the number of persons sent to jail is in itself an extremely gratifying fact, and it would, of course, be still more satisfactory if we could infer from it that the moral tone of the community has been improving in anything like the same measure.