consumption of the various kinds of intoxicants will be found in the chapter on "Food Supply and Cost of Living": Colony. New South Wales Victoria Queensland.. South Australia... Western Australia Tasmania New Zealand. Australasia............. Proof Gallons of population. 2.10 2.62 2.69 2.18 5.37 1.34 1.60 2.29 These figures show the importance which must be attached to police administration when studying the question of drunkenness. The strength of the police force in each of the colonies at the end of 1896 is given below: The record of cases heard before a Court of Magistrates cannot be regarded as altogether a trustworthy indication of the social progress. of Australasia, because, as has been pointed out, it includes many kinds of offences which cannot fairly be classed as criminal, and the number of these has a tendency to increase with the increase of local enactments. The committals for trial, taken in conjunction with the convictions for crime in the Superior Courts, may be regarded as much more conclusive on the question of the progress of society or the reverse. In some respects. even this evidence is misleading, for, as already shown, in the less popu-lous provinces there are no Courts intermediary between the Magistrates" and the Supreme Courts, so that many offences which in New South Wales, for example, are tried by a jury are in some of the other provinces dealt with by magistrates, and even in Victoria, where there are Courts of General Sessions, magistrates have a much wider jurisdiction H than in New South Wales. But for the purpose of showing the decrease in serious crime in Australasia as a whole the proportion of committals and of convictions in Superior Courts may fairly be taken, and this information is given below. It will be seen that during the thirty-five years from 1861 to 1896 the rate of committals per thousand of population has dropped from 2.2 to 0.8, and of convictions from 1.3 to 0·5: Per 1,000 of Population. In noting these facts and comparing the results with those obtained in Great Britain during the same period, it must not be forgotten that some of the provinces of Australasia have been compelled gradually to reform a portion of their original population, and that in the case of colonies such as Victoria and Queensland, not originally peopled in any degree by convicts, the attractions of the gold-fields have drawn within their borders a population by no means free from criminal instincts and antecedents. Viewed in this light, the steady progress made cannot but be regarded as exceedingly satisfactory, and the expectation may not unreasonably be entertained that the same improvement will be continued until the ratio of crime to population will compare favourably with that of any part of the world. Below will be found the number of convictions in the Superior Courts of each colony, at decennial periods from 1861 to 1891, as well as for the year 1896: The following table gives a classification of the offences for which the accused persons were convicted during 1896; also the rate of convictions and of committals per 1,000 of population. It will be seen that the rate of convictions in the Superior Courts of Victoria is 0.36 per thousand; but if the persons who received sentences of over six months' imprisonment at the hands of magistrates were taken into account, the proportion would be as high as that of New South Wales. The colony of Tasmania has an even smaller proportion of convictions in Superior Courts than Victoria, and South Australia is but slightly higher, but in those two provinces, as already pointed out, no intermediate Courts exist:: There is no doubt that New South Wales would appear to much greater advantage in a comparison of crime statistics if there existed in that colony any law preventing the entrance of criminals, such as is rigidly enforced in most of the other provinces. In the absence of such a protective measure, the mother colony has become a happy hunting-ground for the desperadoes of Australasia. That there is ground for this assertion is shown by the fact that whereas in New South Wales offenders born in the colony only formed 34 per cent. of the total apprehensions in 1896, in Victoria 45 per cent. of arrested persons were of local birth; while at the census of 1891 the element of the population of local birth was larger in the former than in the latter colony. The punishment of death is very seldom resorted to except in cases of murder, though formerly such was not the case. Thus the number of executions has steadily fallen from 151 during the decade 1841-50 to 66 during the ten years 1881-90. In South Australia the extreme penalty has been most sparingly inflicted, there having been only 10 executions in the twenty-six years which closed with 1896. The following table shows the number of executions in each province during each decade of the 50 years ended 1890, also those which took place in 1891-95 and 1896. Queensland was incorporated with New South Wales until the end of 1859, though Victoria became a separate colony in 1851. It will be noticed that the returns are defective so far as Western Australia is concerned : 1841-50. 1851-60. 1861-70. 1871-80. 1881-90. 1891-95. 1896. Colony. New South Wales... 14 6 The returns relating to the prisons of the colonies are in some cases very incomplete. The prisoners in confinement at any specified time may be divided into those who have been tried and sentenced, those who are awaiting their trial, and debtors. allow of this distinction being made. prisoners in confinement on the 31st Colony. The returns of four of the colonies The number and classification of December, 1896, were as follow:- The returns of Victoria and Tasmania do not enable the distinction made in the foregoing table to be drawn, but they give the total number of prisoners in confinement on the 31st December, 1896, as 1,238 and 137 respectively, while Western Australia records a daily average of 457. Taking the figure just mentioned to be correct for the end of the year, there was a prison population in Australasia of 5,478, or about 1.27 in every thousand of the population. SUICIDES. Suicide would unfortunately appear to be increasing in proportion to population, as well as in actual number of cases, since 1871. It is believed that the actual number of suicides is even larger than is shown in the tables, especially during recent years; for there is a growing disposition on the part of coroners' juries to attribute to accident what is really the result of an impulse of self-destruction. The following table indicates a portion of the past history and present position of the colonies in this respect :— Compared with the total number of deaths and the mean population, suicides in the Australasian colonies during the last ten years (1887-96) show the following proportions per 100,000: Tasmania, therefore, stands in a more favourable position than any of the other colonies, and is the only colony in which the rate is less than in England, where deaths by suicide average only 8 per 100,000 of population. Compared with the rates of some European countries, however, that of Australasia is small, for during the period 1887-91 the average number of suicides per 100,000 of population was, in Denmark, 25.3; in France, 21.8; in Switzerland, 21·6; Prussia, 19.7; Austria, 15-9; Belgium, 12.2; Sweden, 11-9; Bavaria, 11-8; England, 80; Norway, 6.6; Holland, 5-8; Scotland, 5-6; Italy, 5-2; and Ireland, 2.4. It is the general experience that suicide is increasing. |