Culpable homicide 28 Assaults of husbands on wives 690 Cruel and unnatural treatment of children 242 Housebreaking of all kinds 190 Theft 1,916 Malicious mischief 986 Betting games and lotteries 96 Breach of the peace, etc. 519 Cruelty to animals 145 Offences in relation to dogs 148 Drunkenness 5,785 Offences against Elementary Education Acts 397 Army deserters 1,207 Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regulations 9,570 Prostitution 613 Bicycling, etc, offences 367 Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road Act offences 2,664 Public Health Act offences 162 Lodging without consent of owner under Vagrancy Acts 425 ------ 26,150
It will thus be seen that theft and drunkenness bear the gree among Scotch crimes, while the large number of offences against police acts, by-laws, and regulations tends to show that the Scot is not a good citizen. The mere statistics as to crime, however, do not give one anything like an adequate idea of the general depravity of the Scotch character. To understand it properly we must add to the criminal returns the illegitimacy returns.
From Dr. Albert Leffingwell’s[16] book on illegitimacy I take the following passage:
“In 1881 the census of Scotland showed that there were then living in that portion of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women (that is to say, spinsters and widows) between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. During the ten years 1878-87 there were born in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate children, or an annual average of twenty-one to each thousand unmarried females at this specified age. In England and Wales the corresponding number of the unmarried females was 3,046,431, and the number of illegitimate births during the same period was 426,184, or fourteen to each thousand of the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number of unmarried women at this age was a third larger than in Scotland, or 731,767. Yet to each thousand of these were born every year less than five illegitimate children during a ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again we are perplexed with the problem why Scotia and Hibernia should present such widely different contrasts. Every year in Scotland there are _five times the proportion_ of bastards that see the light in Ireland!”