of criminal statistics for England and Wales for the years 1841 and 1847, makes the following remarks upon the facts there presented:

“This table well deserves study. It shows that the proportional amount of crime to population calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in both years in almost all the agricultural counties of England than it was in the manufacturing and mining districts.… With what terrible significance do these statistics plead the cause of the poor of our rural districts! Notwithstanding that a town life necessarily presents so many more opportunities for, and temptations to, vice than a rural life; notwithstanding that the associations of the latter are naturally so much purer and so much more moral than those of the former; notwithstanding the wonderfully crowded state of the great manufacturing cities of Lancashire; notwithstanding the constant influx of Irish, sailors, vagrants, beggars, and starving natives of agricultural districts of England and Wales; and notwithstanding the miserable state of most of the primary schools of those districts and the great ignorance of the majority of the inhabitants, still, in the face of all these and other equally significant facts, the criminality of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire is LESS in proportion to the population than that of most of the rural districts of England and Wales!”[13]

In Scotland illegitimacy is more common in the country than in the towns and cities. In 1870 the rate of illegitimacy for the whole country was 9.4 per cent., or 1 in every 10.6; whereas in the rural districts alone it was 10.5, or 1 in every 9.5. In 1871 it was for the whole country 10.1, or 1 in every 9.8, and in the rural districts 11.2, or 1 in every 8.9.[14] In England also the rate of illegitimacy is much larger in the rural districts than in the cities, whereas in Catholic France it is just the reverse. In the country

districts of England we have the following rate:

Nottingham,8.9
York, North Riding,8.9
Salop,9.8
Westmoreland,9.7
Norfolk,10.7
Cumberland,11.4

 In France:

Rural districts,
4.2
La Vendée,2.2
Brittany—Côte d’Or,1.2

Thus in the most Catholic rural districts of France there are only one or two illegitimate births in every hundred.

This is also true of Prussia, whose most strongly Catholic provinces are Westphalia and the Rhineland. In Westphalia there are only three and a half illegitimate births in every hundred, and in the Rhineland only three and a third; but in thoroughly Protestant Pomerania and Brandenburg there are ten and twelve illegitimate births in the hundred.[15] In Ireland, again, we find the same state of things. The rate of illegitimate births for all Ireland is 3.8 per cent.; but the lowest proportion is in Connaught, nineteen-twentieths of whose people are Catholics, and the greatest is in Ulster, half of whose population is Protestant. “The sum of the whole matter,” says the Scotsman (June, 1869), a leading organ of Presbyterian Scotland, “is that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly popish and wholly Irish Connaught—which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland as a whole is three times more immoral than Ireland as a whole.” There is no reason why further proof should be given of what is a

manifest truth: that rural populations—let us say, rather, the people—in proportion as they are Catholic, are also chaste; and consequently that the Catholic Church, as every man who is competent to judge must know, is the mother of purity, which is the soul of Christian life, and without which we cannot draw near to the heart of the Saviour and supreme Lover of men. Protestants, however, will be at no loss for arguments. Should the worst come to the worst, illegitimacy, like the gallows, may be declared an evidence of civilization, and then it needs must follow, as the night the day, that it is more common in Protestant than in Catholic countries.

Let us now turn to the vice of intemperance. “I am sure,” says Hill, “that I am within the truth when I state, as the result of minute and extensive inquiry, that, in four cases out of five, when an offence is committed intoxicating drink has been one of the causes.”[16]

In an attempt, then, to form an estimate of the relative morality of nations, we should not omit to consider the vice of drunkenness, which is the cause of half the crime and misery in the world. Were it in our power to obtain accurate statistics on this subject, as on that of illegitimacy, the superior sobriety of the Catholic nations would be shown even more strikingly than their superior chastity. The Spaniards, it is universally acknowledged, are the soberest people in Europe, as the Swedes are the most intemperate. Their respective geographical positions suggest at once what is often assigned as a sufficient explanation of this fact—the great difference of climate. It was long