Alexandria Gazette

Miscellaneous.

DEMORALIZATION OF SWEDEN—It is a singular and embarrassing fact, that the Swedish nation, isolated from the mass of the European people, and almost entirely agricultural or pastoral, having, in about 3,000,000 of individuals, only 14,925 employed in manufactories and these not congregated in one or two places, but scattered among 2,037 factories; having no great standing army or navy; no extended commerce; no afflux of strangers; no considerable city but one; and having schools and universities in a fair proportion, and a powerful and complete church establishment undisturbed in its labors by sect or schism; is, notwithstanding, in a more demoralized state than any nation in Europe—more demoralized even than any equal portion of the dense manufacturing population of Great Britain.

This is a very curious fact in moral statistics—It is so directly opposed to all received opinions and long established theories of the superior moral condition, greater innocence, purity of manners, and exemption from vice or crime of the pastoral and agricultural state of society, compared to the commercial and manufacturing, that, if it rested merely on the traveller's own impressions, observations or experience, it would not be entitled to any credit. According to the official returns published in the Swedish State Gazette, in March 1837, the number of persons prosecuted for criminal offences before all the Swedish courts in the year 1835, was 26,275, of whom 21,262 were convicted, 4,915 acquitted, and 98 remained under examination. In 1835, the total population of Sweden was 2,983,144 individuals. In this year, therefore, one person of every 114 of the whole nation had been accused, and one in every 140 persons, convicted of criminal offences. By the same official returns it appears that, in the five years from 1830 to 1834, inclusive, one person in every 46 of the inhabitants of the towns, and one in every 179 of the rural population had, on an average, been punished each year for criminal offences. In 1836, the number of persons tried for criminal offences in all the courts of the kingdom, was 26,925, of whom 22,292 were condemned, 3,688 acquitted, and 945 under trial or committal. The criminal lists of this year are stated to be unusually light, yet they give a result of one person in every 112 of the whole population accused, and one in about every 134 convicted of criminal offences; and, taking the population of the towns, and the rural population separately, one person in every 46 individuals of the former, and one in every 174 individuals of the latter, have been convicted within the year 1836 for criminal offences

* * The proportion, also, of illegitimate to legitimate births in this country leads to the same conclusion. It is as one to 23/20 in Stockholm. In no other Christian community is there a state of female morals approaching to this. In Paris, the illegitimate are reckoned by Puchet to be one in five births, and in the other towns of France one in 74. In England and Wales it is reckoned there is one illegitimate to 19 legitimate and in London and Middlesex one to 38 legitimate births.

* Figures do not bring home to our imaginations the moral condition of a population so depraved as that of Stockholm. In such a society the offspring of secret adultery, and the births merely saved from illegitimacy by the tardy marriage of parents must be numerous in proportion to the general profligacy. If it were possible to deduct these from one side of the account and add them to the other, to which morally they belong, what a singular picture of depravity on a great scale this city would present! Suppose a traveller standing in the streets of Edinburgh, and able to say, from undeniable public returns, "one out of every three persons passing me is, on an average, the offspring of illicit intercourse; and one out of every forty nine has been convicted within these twelve months of some criminal offence!"

(Laing's Tour in Sweden.)