In recent discussions of the effects of education upon morals, the
relative conditions of Great Britain and France in this respect
have often been referred to. The following paragraph shows that the
statistics in the case have not been well understood:
"In a recent sitting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences,
M. Leon Faucher, the representative, read a paper on the state of
crime in England; and some of the journals have taken advantage
of this to institute a comparison with returns of the criminality
of France, recently published by the Government--the result being
anything but flattering to England. But M. Faucher, the Academy, the
newspapers, and almost everybody else in France, seems to be entirely
ignorant that it is impossible to institute a comparison between the
amount of crime in England and the amount of crime in France, inasmuch
as crimes are not the same in both countries. Thus, for example, it
is a felony in England to steal a pair of shoes, the offender is sent
before the Court of Assize, and his offense counts in the official
returns as a "crime;" in France, on the contrary, a petty theft is
considered a _délit_, or simple offense, is punished by a police
magistrate, and figures in the returns as an "offense." With
respect to murders, too, the English have only two general names for
killing--murder or manslaughter--but the French have nearly a dozen
categories of killing, of which what the English call murder forms
only one. It is the same, in short, with almost every species of
crime."