Читать книгу: «International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 7, August 12, 1850», страница 7

CRIME, IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

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."