account the comparatively small number of persons who get into our high schools and colleges and the comparatively large number whose educational advantages never enabled them to do more, in an intellectual way, than read and write a little, the figures do not seem to show that higher education in evitably tends to rid us of criminality. A report from Sing Sing, N. Y., says that of a prison population there of 1,382, 120 were ranked as uneducated, 13 had an academic education, 6 a collegiate education, and 1,243 had a common-school education. The majority of the men in the Joliet pen itentiary are unmarried, and most of them are comparatively young. The social rela tions of convicts are not given in the pub lished reports of any of the penal institutions of our State, but I was privileged to examine records at Joliet in which the family rela tions of men in that institution are set forth, in so far as they can be gathered from the men themselves and from more or less cor roborative evidence that necessarily comes to the notice of the prison officials in dis charge of their duties. I have looked through part of the memoranda I made of that examination, which extended to 3,000 cases, and of 1,042 cases thus re-examined I find that 664 men were reported un married, 62 were widowers, 79 had been married, but had separated from their wives, in six cases the family relations were not known, and in 231 cases the men were mar ried and living with their families when they were arrested for the crimes of which they were convicted. For some years, too, youths and young men convicted of crime have been sent to the reformatory at Pontiac. While the re port of that institution is silent on this question, it tells us the ages of those in the institution, and these range from ten to twenty years. The number of inmates of any given age there seems to increase as the age is increased. The ages from sixteen to twenty have more representatives than those
from twelve to sixteen. It seems probable that few, if any, of these youths and young men are married, and it seems more than probable that from one half to two thirds of the 1,127 inmates on hand October I, 1896, belong to the territory in Illinois that sends its adult convicts to Joliet. Add 600, then, to the 1,042 cases of which I have written above, and of the 1,642 convicts thus reported, 1,400 were single and 231 were married and living with their families when convicted of the crimes for w-hich they were sent to prison; that is, but one seventh of the whole number had their own homes and were living in them. I have before me a report of arrests made by the police of Chicago during 1894 and 1895, and it shows that nearly three quarters of the whole number arrested were unmarried. The lack of good homes and good home surroundings is a factor too often overlooked when we essay to study the leading causes of crime. It is one of the tremendous facts of human life that by every act, impulse and thought men are fashioning not themselves only but those around them and those who may come after them in remote generations. It is hard for him who has come into this world of a bad ancestry, and who has al ways been surrounded by drunkenness, oaths and uncleanliness, and from his youth has breathed the air of the slums, to lead an upright life. We distrust these classes, and our distrust brings about their continuance and their multiplication. It becomes to us very expensive in the end. By our distrust we help make the thief, the burglar and the incendiary and by our penal system we help keep him so. Emerson once said : " Let our affection flow out to our fellows : it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. Our acceptance of the sentiment of love through out Christendom, for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our feet in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our ser vice."-1— J. D. Roth, in the Chicago Record.
