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Statistical Investigations   417


{ii) What are the results upon the lives and conduct of children in after life who don't forget all they have been taught?

(iii) What- are the methods and what are the results, for example in Night Schools and

Secondary Schools, in preventing primary education from being a waste?

If we know not what are the effects upon our national life of Forster's Act is not this .a

strange gap in reasonable England's knowledge?

. B (1). The results of legal punishments-i.e. the deterrent or encouraging effects upon crime of being in gaol. Some excellent and hardworking reformers tell us: Whatever you do keep a boy out of gaol-work the First Offenders' Act-once in gaol, always in gaol-gaol is the cradle of crime. Other equally zealous and active reformers say-a boy must be in gaol once at least to learn its hardships before he can be rescued. Is it again not strange in practical England that we know no more about this?

B (2). Is the career of a criminal from big first committal-and for what action-to his last, whether (a) to the gallows, or (b) to rehabilitation, recorded? It is stated by trustworthy persons that no such statistics exist, and that we can only learn the criminal's career from himself in friendly confidence-what it has been from being in gaol, say for stealing a turnip for a boys' feast, or for breaking his schoolroom window in a temper because he has been turned out of school for making a noise-to murder or to morality.

In how many cases must all our legislation be experiment, not experience! Any experience must be thrown away.

B (3). What effect has education on crime?

(a) Some people answer unhesitatingly : As education increases crime decreases; (b) Others as unhesitatingly : Education only teaches to escape conviction, or to steal better when released. (c) Others again : Education has nothing to do with it either way.

C. We spend millions in rates in putting people into Workhouses, and millions in charity in taking them out. What is the proportion of names which from generation to generation appear the same in Workhouse records? What is the proportion of children de-pauperised or pauperised by the Workhouse? Does the large Union School, or the small, or 'boarding out' return more pauper children to honest independent life? On girls what is the result of the training of the large Union Schools in fitting them for honest little domestic places-and what proportion of them falling into vice have to return to the Workhouse? Upon all such subjects how should the use of statistics be taught?

D. India with its 250 millions-200 millions being our fellow-subjects, I suppose-enters so little into practical English public life that many scarcely know where this small country is. It forms scarcely an element in our calculations, though we have piles of Indian statistics. [As to India the problems are:]

(i) Whether the peoples there are growing richer or poorer, better or worse fed and clothed?

(ii) Whether their physical powers are deteriorating or not?

(iii) Whether fever not only kills less or more, but whether it incapacitates from labour for fewer or more months in the year?

(iv) What are the native manufactures and productions, needed by the greatest customer in the world, the Government of India, which could be had as good and cheap in India, as those to be had from England?

(v) Whether the native trades and handicrafts are being ruined or being encouraged under our rule?

(vi) What is the result of Sir C. Wood's (1853) Education Act in India?

These are only a very few of the Indian things which-I will not say are hotly contested, for few care either in the House of Commons or out, but-have their opposites asserted with equal positiveness.

- I have no time to make my letter any shorter, although these are but a very few instances.
What is wanted is that so high an authority as Mr Francis Galton should jot down other great
branches upon which he would wish for statistics, and for some teaching how to use these statistics
in order to legislate for and to administer our national life with more precision and experience.
One authority was consulted and he answered : "That we have statistics and that Govern
ment must do it." Surely the answering question is : The Government does not use the statistics
which it has in administering and legislating-except indeed to "deal damnation" across the
floor of the H. of C. at the Opposition and vice versd. Why? Because though the great majority

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