Further, the statistical returns of crime demonstrate, not only that such is the present state of crime in the densely peopled and manufacturing districts, compared to what obtains in the agricultural or pastoral, but that the tendency of matters is still worse;3 and that, great as has been 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 profligacy 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 subject, 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 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.

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