it is possible for them to attain any
higher condition; they are not even sentient enough to desire, with any
strength of feeling, to change their situation; they are not intelligent
enough to be perseveringly discontented; they are not sensible to what
we call the voice of conscience; they do not understand the necessity of
avoiding crime, beyond the mere fear of the police and the jail; they
have unclear, indefinite, and undefinable ideas of all around them; they
eat, drink, breed, work, and die; and while they pass through their
brute-like existence here, the richer and more intelligent classes are
obliged to guard them with police and standing armies, and to cover the
land with prisons, cages, and all kinds of receptacles for the
perpetrators of crime."

Surely it must be some hallucination of mind, which leads men to suppose
that the diffusion of knowledge among such a population, even though it
be only scientific and intellectual knowledge, can have any natural or
general tendency adverse to religion and morals. Apart, however, from
speculation, and as a pure question of fact, the recorded statistics of
crime point unmistakably the other way. Criminal records the world over
prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the overwhelming majority of crimes
are committed by persons deplorably ignorant. Intellectual education,
therefore, I contend, even when deprived of its natural ally and
adjunct, religious training, has no natural tendency to produce knaves
and villains. On the contrary, it is a most efficient corrective and
restraint of the evil and debasing tendencies of human nature. If the
intellect is not so high a region in man's constitution as the moral
powers, which I readily grant, it is at least above the mere sensual
part, in which vice and crime have their chief spring and aliment. The
question fortunately is one susceptible of a direct appeal to facts. Who
are the men and women that people our jails and prisons? Are they
persons of education, or are they in the main persons deplorably
ignorant? What is the record of criminal statistics on this point?

I will quote a few of these statistics, from a great mass of similar
evidence lying before me.

Out of 252,544 persons committed for crime in England and Wales, during
a series of years, 229,300, or more than 90 per cent., are reported as
uneducated, either entirely unable to read and write, or able to do so
only very imperfectly; 22,159 could read and write,