ed, and these are the only statistics
which can be implicitly relied upon for testing the position of the
country with regard to crime.

Seeing, then, that the total amount of crime is regularly growing,
how is the decrease in the daily average of persons in prison to be
accounted for?

This decrease may be accounted for in two ways. It may be shown that
although the number of people committed to prison is on the increase,
the nature of the offences for which these people are convicted is not
so grave. Or, in the second place, it may be shown that, although the
crimes committed now are equally serious with those committed twenty
years ago, the magistrates and judges are adopting a more lenient line
of action, and are inflicting shorter sentences after a conviction.
Let us for a moment consider the proposition that crime is not so
grave now as it was twenty years ago. In order to arrive at a fairly
accurate conclusion on this matter, we have only to look at the number
of offences of a serious nature reported to the police. Comparing the
number of cases of murder, attempts to murder, manslaughter, shooting
at, stabbing and wounding, and adding to these offences the crimes of
burglary, housebreaking, robbery, and arson--comparing all these cases
reported to the police for the five years 1870-1874, with offences of
a like character reported in the five years 1884-1888, we find that
the proportion of grave offences to the population was, in many cases,
as great in the latter period as in the former.[7] This shows clearly
that crime, while it is increasing in extent, is not materially
decreasing in seriousness; and the chief reason the prison population
exhibits a smaller daily average is to be found in the fact that
judges are now pronouncing shorter sentences than was the custom
twenty years ago. We are not left in the dark upon this point; the
judges themselves frequently inform the public that they have taken to
shortening the terms of imprisonment. The extent to which sentences
have been shortened within the last twenty years can easily be
ascertained by comparing the committals to prison and the daily
average of the quinquenniad 1868-72 with the committals and the daily
average of the quinquenniad 1884-88. A comparison between these two
periods shows that the length of imprisonment has decreased twenty-six
per cent. In other words, whereas a man used to receive a sentence of
twelve months' imprisonment, he now receive