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'The general result is that the number of youthful offenders has
diminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they still
bear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals.'

All this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. The number
of persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase or
decrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the total
number of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the great
amount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by the
public, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence of
juvenile crime.

It would be easy to take the criminal statistics of foreign countries,
and to prove from them that the education of the masses there has
brought about an overwhelming increase in the proportion of crimes and
offences committed by young persons under the age of twenty-one.

In Germany, Austria, France, Russia, Italy, Holland, and the United
States juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largely
increased during the last quarter of a century. But, without making an
exhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in the
law, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen other
contingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definite
conclusions from these figures.

One has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and common
sense. There is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spite
of education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage in
respect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offenders
are drawn from this truant class to a disproportionate extent. It must
be remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance at
school is due to the employment of children--especially in rural
districts, where the members of School Boards are often the very people
who extract most profit from child labour.

A prison chaplain of great experience, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, wrote, in
his interesting work on 'Prisons and Prisoners': 'While covetousness is
a factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimes
of greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in past
generations. This week I got the Church of England Waifs and Strays
Society to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filled
up, and cashed, a