Moral statistics most narrowly refers to numerical data generally considered to be indicative of social pathology in groups of people. Examples include statistics on

crimes In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Can ...

(against persons and property), illiteracy,

suicide Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders), physical disorders (such as chronic fatigue syndrome), and ...

, illegitimacy, abortion, divorce, prostitution, and the economic situation sometimes called pauperism in the 19th century. The gathering of anything that might be called social statistics is often dated from

John Graunt John Graunt (24 April 1620 – 18 April 1674) has been regarded as the founder of demography. Graunt was one of the first demographers, and perhaps the first epidemiologist, though by profession he was a haberdasher. He was bankrupted later in l ...

’s (1662) analysis of the London ''Bills of Mortality'', which tabulated birth and death data collected by London parishes. The beginnings of the systematic collection of population statistics (now called demography) occurred in the mid-18th century, often attributed to Johann Peter Süssmilch in 1741. Data on ''moral'' variables began to be collected and disseminated by various state agencies (most notably in France and Britain) in the early 19th century, and were widely used in debates about social reform. The first major work on this topic was the ''Essay on moral statistics of France'' by

André-Michel Guerry André-Michel Guerry (; December 24, 1802 – April 9, 1866) was a French lawyer and amateur statistician. Together with Adolphe Quetelet he may be regarded as the founder of moral statistics which led to the development of criminology, soc ...

in 1833. In this book, Guerry presented

thematic map A thematic map is a type of map that portrays the geographic pattern of a particular subject matter (theme) in a geographic area. This usually involves the use of map symbols to visualize selected properties of geographic features that are not ...

s of the departments of France, shaded according to illiteracy, crimes against persons and against property, illegitimacy, donations to the poor and so forth, and used these to ask questions about how such moral variables were related. In Britain this theme was taken up beginning in 1847 by

Joseph Fletcher Joseph Francis Fletcher (April 10, 1905 in Newark, New Jersey - October 28, 1991 in Charlottesville, Virginia) was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Flet ...

who published several articles on the topic ''Moral and educational statistics of England and Wales.''Fletcher, J. (1849). Moral and educational statistics of England and Wales. ''Journal of the Statistical Society of London'', 12, 151–176, 189–335.

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