lliterate; or nearly one-third of the crime is
committed by six-hundredths of the population. In the city prisons for
1870, out of 49,423 criminals, 18,442 could not write and could barely
read, or more than thirty-three per cent.

[Illustration: THE FORTUNES OF A STREET WAIF. (Second Stage.)]

In the Reformatories of the country, according to the statement of Dr.
Bittinger before the National Congress on prison-discipline at
Cincinnati, out of the average number of the inmates for 1868, of 7,963
twenty-seven per cent. were wholly illiterate.

Very great criminality is, of course, possible with high education; but
in the immense majority of cases a very small degree of mental training
or intellectual tastes is a preventive of idleness and consequent crime
and of extreme poverty. The difference between knowing how to read and
not knowing will often be the line between utter poverty and a capacity
for various occupations.

Among the inmates of the city prisons a large percentage are without a
trade, and no doubt this idle condition is largely due to their
ignorance and is one of the great stimulants to their criminal course.
Who can say how much the knowledge of Geography alone may stimulate a
child or a youth to emigrate, and thus leave his immediate temptations
and escape pressing poverty?

ORPHANAGE.

Out of 452 criminal children received into the House of Refuge in New
York during 1870, only 187 had both parents living, so that nearly sixty
per cent. had lost one or both of their parents, or were otherwise
separated from them.

According to Dr. Bittinger, [Transactions of the National Congress, p.
279.] of the 7,963 inmates of the reformatories in the United States in
1870, fifty-five per cent. were orphans or half orphans.

The following figures strikingly show the extent to which orphanage and
inheritance influence the moral condition of children.

Mettrai, the celebrated French reformatory, has received since its
foundation 3,580 youthful inmates. Of these, there are 707 whose parents
are convicts; 308 whose parents live in concubinage; 534 "natural"
children; 221 foundlings; 504 children of a second marriage; and 1,542
without either father or mother. [Une visite a Mettrai. Paris, 1868.]

An intelligent French writer, M. de Marsangy, [Moralisation de l'enfance
coupable, p. 18.] in writing of the causes of juvenile crime in France,
says that "a fifth of those who have been t