from the Parliamentary returns, exhibiting the progress of serious crime in the principal counties, agricultural, pastoral, and manufacturing, of the empire, during the last fifteen years. We are unwilling to load our pages with figures, and are well aware how distasteful they are to a large class of readers; and if those results were as familiar to others as they are to ourselves, we should be too happy to take them for granted, as they do first principles in the House of Commons, and proceed at once to the means of remedy. But the facts on this subject have been so often misrepresented by party or prejudice, and are in themselves so generally unknown, that it is indispensable to lay a foundation in authentic information before proceeding further in the inquiry. The greatest difficulty which those practically acquainted with the subject experience in such an investigation, is to make people believe their statements, even when founded on the most extensive practical knowledge, or the most accurate statistical inquiry. There is such a prodigious difference between the condition of mankind and the progress of corruption in the agricultural or pastoral, and manufacturing or densely peopled districts, that those accustomed to the former will not believe any statements made regarding the latter. They say they are incredible or exaggerated; that the persons who make them are têtes montées; that their ideas are very vague, and their suggestions utterly unworthy the consideration either of men of sense or of government. With such deplorable illusions does igno

rance repel the suggestions of knowledge; theory, of experience; selfishness, of philanthropy; cowardice, of resolution. Thus nothing whatever is done to remedy or avert the existing evils: the districts not endangered unite as one man to resist any attempt to form a general system for the alleviation of misery or diminution of crime in those that are, and the preponderance of the unendangered districts in the legislature gives them the means of effectually doing so. The evils in the endangered districts are such, that it is universally felt they are beyond the reach of local remedy or alleviation. Thus, between the two, nothing whatever is done to arrest, or guard against, the existing or impending evils. Meanwhile, destitution, profligacy, sensuality, and crime, advance with unheard-of rapidity in the manufacturing districts, and the dangerous classes there massed together combine every three or four years in some general strike or alarming insurrection, which, while it lasts, excites universal terror, and is succeeded, when suppressed, by the same deplorable system of supineness, selfisliness, and infatuation.

The table in the note exhibits the number of commitments for serious offences, with the population of each, of eight counties-pastoral, agricultural, and manufacturing-in Great Britain during the year 1841.* We take the returns for that year, both because it was the year in which the census was taken, and because the succeeding year, 1842, being the year of the great outbreak in England, and violent strike in Scotland, the figures, both in

that and the succeeding year, may be supposed to exhibit a more unfavourable result for the manufacturing districts than a fair average of years. From this table, it appears that the vast preponderance of crime is to be found in the manufacturing or denselypeopled districts, and that the proportion per cent of commitments which they exhibit, as compared with the population, is generally three, often five times, what appears in the purely agricultural and pastoral districts. The comparative criminality of the agricultural, manufacturing, and pastoral districts is not to be considered as accurately measured by these returns, because so many of the agricultural counties, especially in England, are overspread with towns and manufactories or collieries. Thus Kent and Shropshire are justly classed with agricultural counties, though part of the former is in fact a suburb of London, and of the latter overspread with demoralizing coal mines. The entire want of any police force in some of the greatest

manufacturing counties, as Lanarkshire, by permitting nineteen-twentieths of the crime to go unpunished, exhibits a far less amount of criminality than would be brought to light under a more vigilant system. But still there is enough in this table to attract serious and instructive attention. It appears that the average of seven pastoral counties exhibits an average of 1 commitment for serious offences out of 1155 souls: of eight counties, partly agricultural and partly manufacturing, of 1 in 682: and of eight manufacturing and mining, of 1 in 476! And the difference between individual counties is still more remarkable, especially when counties purely agricultural or pastoral can be compared with those for the most part manufacturing or mining. Thus the proportion of commitment for serious crime in the pastoral counties of Anglesey, is Carnarvon, Selkirk,

Cumberland,

1 in 3900

1 in 2452

1 in 1990

1 in 1194

In the purely agricultural counties of

the increase of population during the last thirty years in the manufacturing and densely peopled districts, the progress of crime has been still greater and more alarming. From the instructive and curious tables below, constructed from the criminal returns given in Porter's Parliamentary Tables, and the returns of the census taken in 1821, 1831, and 1841, it appears, that while in some of the purely pastoral counties, such as Selkirk and Anglesey, crime has remained during the last twenty years nearly stationary, and in some of the purely agricultural, such as Perth and Aberdeen, it has considerably diminished, in the agricultural and mining or manufacturing, such as Shropshire and Kent, it has doubled during the same period and in the manufacturing and mining districts, such as Lancashire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, and Renfrewshire, more than tripled in the same time. It appears, from the same authentic sources of information, that the progress of crime during the last twenty years has been much more rapid in the manufacturing and densely peopled than in the simply densely peopled districts; for in Middlesex, during the last twenty years, population has advanced about fifty per cent, and serious crime has increased in nearly the same proportion, having swelled from 2480 to 3514: whereas in Lancashire, during the same period, population has advanced also fifty per cent, but serious crime has considerably more than doubled, having risen from 1716 to 3987.

Here, then, we are at length on firm ground in point of fact. Several writers of the liberal school who had a partiality for manufactures, because their chief political supporters were to be found among that class of society, have laboured hard to show that manufactures are noways detrimental either to health or morals; and that the mortality and crime of the manufacturing counties were in no respect greater than those of the pastoral or agricultural districts. The common sense of mankind has uniformly revolted against this absurdity, so completely contrary to what experience every where tells in a language not to be misunderstood; but it has now been completely disproved by the

Parliamentary returns. The criminal statistics have exposed this fallacy as completely, in reference to the different degrees of depravity in different parts of the empire, as the registrar-general's returns have, in regard to the different degrees of salubrity in employments, and mortality in rural districts and manufacturing places. It now distinctly appears that crime is greatly more prevalent in proportion to the numbers of the people in densely peopled than thinly inhabited localities, and that it is making far more rapid progress in the former situation than the latter. Statistics are not to be despised when they thus, at once and decisively, disprove errors so assiduously spread, maintained by writers of such respectability, and supported by such large and powerful bodies in

the state.

Nor can it be urged with the slightest degree of foundation, that this superior criminality of the manufacturing and densely peopled districts is owing to a police force being more generally established than in the agricultural or pastoral, and thus crime being more thoroughly detected in the former situation than the latter. For, in the first place, in several of the greatest manufacturing counties, particularly Lanarkshire in Scotland, there is no police at all; and the criminal establishment is just what it was forty years ago. In the next place, a police force is the consequence of a previous vast accumulation or crime, and is never established till the risk to life and insecurity to property had rendered it unbearable. Being always established by the voluntary assessment of the inhabitants, nothing can be more certain than that it never can be called into existence but by such an increase of crime as has rendered it a matter of necessity.

We are far, however, from having approached the whole truth, if we have merely ascertained, upon authentic evidence, that crime is greatly more prevalent in the manufacturing than the rural districts. That will probably be generally conceded; and the preceding details have been given merely to show the extent of the difference, and the rapid steps which it is taking. It is more material to inquire what are the causes of this superior profi

gacy of manufacturing to rural districts; and whether it arises unavoidably from the nature of their respective employments, or is in some degree within the reach of human amendment or prevention.

It is usual for persons who are not practically acquainted with the sub'ect, to represent manufacturing occupations as necessarily and inevitably hurtful to the human mind. The crowding together, it is said, young persons, of different sexes and in great numbers, in the hot atmosphere and damp occupations of factories or mines, is necessarily destructive to morality, and ruinous to regularity of habit. The passions are excited by proximity of situation or indecent exposure; infant labour early emancipates the young from parental control; domestic subordination, the true foundation for social virtue, is destroyed; the young exposed to temptation before they have acquired strength to resist it; and vice spreads the more extensively from the very magnitude of the establishments on which the manufacturing greatness of the country depends. Such views are generally entertained by writers on the social state of the country; and being implicitly adopted by the bulk of the community, the nation has abandoned itself to a sort of despair on the subject, and regarding manufacturing

districts as the necessary and unavoidable hotbed of crimes, strives only to prevent the spreading of the contagion into the rural parts of the country.

There is a certain degree of truth in these observations; but they are much exaggerated, and it is not in these causes that the principal sources of the profligacy of the manufacturing districts is to be found.

The real cause of the demoralization of manufacturing towns is to be found, not in the nature of the employment which the people there receive, so much as in the manner in which they are brought together, the unhappy prevalence of general strikes, and the prodigious multitudes who are cast down by the ordinary vicissitudes of life, or the profligacy of their parents, into a situation of want, wretchedness, and despair.

Consider how, during the last half century, the people have been brought together in the great manufacturing districts of England and Scotland. So rapid has been the progress of manufacturing industry during that period, that it has altogether outstripped the powers of population in the districts where it was going forward, and occasioned a prodigious influx of persons from different and distant quarters, who have migrated from their paternal homes, and settled in the manufacturing districts, never to return.* Authentic