with the United Kingdom, an additional amount of crime.  In the colony of Victoria, in proportion to every 100,000 inhabitants over ten years of age, there are nearly one-third more murders annually than in the United Kingdom.  On what ground is this considerable increase of homicide to be accounted for, except on the ground of climate?  The higher percentage is not caused by difference of race; it is not caused by worse economic conditions—­these conditions are much superior to our own—­the meaning of the figures is not obscured by any material differences of legal procedure or legal nomenclature.  It cannot be urged that the Victorian population are the dregs of the home population; the very opposite is the fact.  The bad characters who emigrate are the only disturbing element; but, after all, these men are not so numerous, and the evil effects of their presence is counterbalanced by the superiority of the average colonist to the average citizen who remains at home.  It may be said that there is greater difficulty in detecting crime in a new colony than in an old and settled country.  As applied to some colonies it is possible this objection may be sound, but, as applied to Victoria, it will not hold good.  In Victoria the police are much more effective than they are at home, and a criminal has much less chance of going unpunished there than he has in England.  In Victoria in the year 1887, out of a total of 40,693 cases reported to the police, 34,473 were brought up for trial.  In England, on the other hand, out of a total of 42,391 indictable offences reported to the police in 1886-7, only 19,045 persons were apprehended.  The Victorian figures include offences of all kinds, petty as well as indictable, whereas the English figures deal with indictable offences only.  But admitting this, and admitting that it is more difficult to arrest indictable offenders, this difficulty is not so great as to explain away the vast difference in the numbers apprehended in Victoria as compared with the numbers apprehended in England.  Only one conclusion can be drawn from these figures, and it is that the Victorian constabulary are more efficient than our own, and that it is a more dangerous thing for a person to break the law in the young colony of Victoria than in the old community at home.

It seems to me that the points of comparison between the United Kingdom and Victoria, in so far as they have any bearing upon crime, have now been exhausted; on almost every one of these points Victoria stands in a more favourable position than ourselves.  The colony has, on the whole, a better kind of citizen; it has superior social and economic conditions; it has a far more effective system of police.  On what possible ground, then, is it, except the ground of climate, that the Victorians are more addicted to homicide than the people of the United Kingdom?  I admit it would be rash to assert that climate is the cause if our own and the Victorian statistics were the only documents to which we could appeal;