5 per year on number of 417
the first four years} children.
In subsequent five } 3, averaging 0.6 per year on number of 728
years, } children.
____
Difference, 15.9
16.5 : 15.9 :: 100 : 96.36.
"Thus," says Mr. Thornton, "it appears that the diminution of the
average annual number of children attending our schools imprisoned in
the latter period of five years, as compared with the annual average of
the previous four years, is ninety-six per cent.--a striking fact, which
is, I think, a manifest proof of the benefit conferred on them by the
religious and secular instruction they receive in our schools, or, at
the very least, of the advantages of rescuing them from the temptations
of idleness, and from evil companionship and example."
I also copy, from the work already referred to, an extract from a paper
on the Reformatory Institutions in and near Bristol, by Mary Carpenter:
"In numberless instances children may be seen growing up decently, who
owe their only training and instruction to the school. Young persons are
noticed in regular work, who, before they attended the Ragged Schools,
were vagrants, or even thieves. Not unfrequently a visit is paid at the
school by a respectable young man, who proves to have been a wild and
troublesome scholar of former times."
Mr. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, in a charge to the grand jury, made in
1839, speaking of the means of repressing crime, says: "It is to
education, in the large and true meaning of the word, that we must all
look as the means of striking at the root of the evil.
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