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S4 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
SO difficult to handle as those of crime. A distinction
has to be made between mere police and administrative
offences, which vary largely according to the things
which Legislatures in their wisdom subject to fine or
not, and the more serious offences, such as robbery and
murder, which are what we think of when we talk of
crime. But in hardly any two countries that I know of
is the distinction drawn on exactly the same lines. You
are almost never quite sure, therefore, what yqu are
doing, unless you are specially careful, when you com-
pare two countries as regards crime. Further, even if
the distinctions were much the same, another difference
is made by the police. You may have fewer trials and
convictions in one country than in another, simply be-
cause the police for various reasons is less efficient, not
because there is less crime. When comparisons, there-
fore, are made between the criminal statistics of two
countries without attention to vital considerations like
these to show that the subject has been really studied,
it is safe to dismiss them without further thought.
But admitting that exact comparisons can be made,
that statistics of crime in two countries are reduced to .
common denominators, I should like to point out that
. the logic of using them as indicative in any way of the
general superiority of one population over another may
be at fault. So far as can be judged, the so-called crime
statistics of a country are not necessarily significant
very much of the general quality of a population, but
they may be significant only of the existence of a
criminal element, which is like a disease from which a
community suffers, but a disease of a superficial, and not
of a vital character. One population may thus have
more crime in it than another, even much more crime,
but substantially the two peoples may be almost alike,
the extent of the criminality in both being quite im-
material. Say, for instance, that the criminal population
by which almost all the crime is done in one country is
I in 500, or ! of I per cent., and in another population
it is I in 250, or f of I per cent., is not the criminal