They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.
All of which is very fine, and, with much more to the like effect, has helped the Scotch peasant into an odour of sanctity which on the whole does not appear to be quite his element. Indeed, so far from conducting his life in the manner suggested by The Cottar’s Saturday Night, the average Scot of the lower orders appears to base himself on the more scandalous portion of Burns’s writing.
According to the latest returns, the population of Scotland is 4,472,000. In the year 1900, which is the latest year for which statistics are available, a matter of 180,000 persons were charged with criminal offences in Scotland. So that out of every twenty-five Scotchmen in Scotland one is either a convicted criminal or a person who has been charged with a criminal offence. From the official Buff-book dealing with the subject I take the following:
“The criminal returns for 1900 show an increase over those for the previous year under all the important classes into which crime and offences are grouped, the number of persons charged has risen to close upon 180,000, and if we compare this with the last published English tables for the year 1899, we shall find, for equal numbers of population, Scotland has over three charges for every two in England.
“Furthermore, imprisonments in Scotland continue to be proportionately much higher than in England, and for every three committals in England there are seven in Scotland. The increase in criminal offences during 1900 is distributed under the following heads”:
| Culpable homicide | 28 |
| Assaults of husbands on wives | 690 |
| Cruel and unnatural treatment of children | 242 |
| Housebreaking of all kinds | 190 |
| Theft | 1,916 |
| Malicious mischief | 986 |
| Betting games and lotteries | 96 |
| Breach of the peace, etc. | 519 |
| Cruelty to animals | 145 |
| Offences in relation to dogs | 148 |
| Drunkenness | 5,785 |
| Offences against Elementary Education Acts | 397 |
| Army deserters | 1,207 |
| Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regulations | 9,570 |
| Prostitution | 613 |
| Bicycling, etc, offences | 367 |
| Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road Act offences | 2,664 |
| Public Health Act offences | 162 |
| Lodging without consent of owner under Vagrancy Acts | 425 |
| 26,150 |
It will thus be seen that theft and drunkenness bear the gree among Scotch crimes, while the large number of offences against police acts, by-laws, and regulations tends to show that the Scot is not a good citizen. The mere statistics as to crime, however, do not give one anything like an adequate idea of the general depravity of the Scotch character. To understand it properly we must add to the criminal returns the illegitimacy returns.
From Dr. Albert Leffingwell’s[16] book on illegitimacy I take the following passage:
“In 1881 the census of Scotland showed that there were then living in that portion of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women (that is to say, spinsters and widows) between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. During the ten years 1878-87 there were born in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate children, or an annual average of twenty-one to each thousand unmarried females at this specified age. In England and Wales the corresponding number of the unmarried females was 3,046,431, and the number of illegitimate births during the same period was 426,184, or fourteen to each thousand of the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number of unmarried women at this age was a third larger than in Scotland, or 731,767. Yet to each thousand of these were born every year less than five illegitimate children during a ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again we are perplexed with the problem why Scotia and Hibernia should present such widely different contrasts. Every year in Scotland there are five times the proportion of bastards that see the light in Ireland!”