,' said my
friend, 'he is an ideal husbandman in every sense of that English word,
for which we have no equivalent. The assize records show that offences
against public morality are almost wholly confined to the towns in
Artois, and it is a notable fact that these particular offences are much
more frequently committed by persons who can read and write than by the
illiterate.'

My friend seemed to be startled when I told him that this 'notable fact'
appeared to me to be quite in accordance with the nature of things, as
set forth in the sound old maxim cited by the Apostle, that 'evil
communications corrupt good manners.' So long as thirty years ago, the
American Census showed that in the six New England States, in which the
proportion of illiterate native Americans to the native white
population was 1 to 312, the proportion to the native white population
of native white criminals was 1 to 1,084; whereas, in the six southern
States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas,
the proportion of native white illiterates being 1 to 12 of the native
white population, the proportion of native white criminals to the native
white population was only 1 to 6,670. Mr. Montgomery of California,
Assistant-Attorney-General of the United States in the Administration of
President Cleveland, working on the lines of inquiry suggested by such
facts as these, did not hesitate, two years ago, to assert that 'the
boasted New England public school system, as now by law established
throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic, is a
poisonous fountain fraught with the seeds of human misery and moral
death.' He cites the official statistics given by a New England
professor, Mr. Royce, to prove that 'there is hardly a state or country
in the civilised world, where atrocious and flagrant crimes are so
common as in educated Massachusetts,' and he shows that the alarming and
unquestionable increase of crime in the United States cannot be
attributed, as it too often is, to the 'foreign element in American
society, the criminal rate of which has remained the same or even
lessened, while the native criminals increased during 1860-1870, from
10,143 to 24,173.' During that decade the total population of the United
States increased from 31,443,321 to 38,567,617. Deducting 2,466,752 for
the increase by immigration, we have a general increase of 4,657,538 in
the native American population, or of less than 15 per cent, agains