A very curious fact comes out in the Judicial statistics
of 1873. It is well known that Ireland, apart from its perennial agrarian difficulties, some drunkenness, and great laxity in punishing murder, is singularly free from crime. The Irish in England and Wales, however, are not free. Out of our 22,712,000 inhabitants, 566,000 are of Irish birth, and instead of furnishing 4,000 convicts in the prisons, they furnish 22,100, five times their proper proportion. The women are especially bad, forming one-fifth of the whole prison population. It is suggested that Ireland exports her oriminal class, but we take it that the fairer explanation is, that the Irishman, like the Englishman, suffers on exportation from the absence of the social atmosphere to which he has been accus- tomed. The pressure of the only opinion he values is with- drawn, and in England, as in America, he becomes indefinitely less self-restrained. The Irish in Liverpool are like Englishmen in -the South Seas, or the less orderly parts of Asia, and betray precisely the same impatience of control.
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