If the past increase and present amount of crime in the British
islands be alone considered, it must afford grounds for the most
melancholy forebodings. When we recollect that since the year 1805,
that is, during a period of less than forty years, in the course of
which population has advanced about sixty-five _per cent_ in Great
Britain and Ireland, crime in England has increased seven hundred per
cent, in Ireland about eight hundred per cent, and in Scotland above
_three thousand six hundred per cent_;[1] it is difficult to say what
is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the
progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase of the
numbers of the people. Nor is the alarming nature of the prospect
diminished by the reflection, that this astonishing increase in human
depravity has taken place during a period of unexampled prosperity
and unprecedented progress, during which the produce of the national
industry had tripled, and the labours of the husbandman kept pace
with the vast increase in the population they were to feed--in which
the British empire carried its victorious arms into every quarter of
the globe, and colonies sprang up on all sides with unheard-of
rapidity--in which a hundred thousand emigrants came ultimately to
migrate every year from the parent state into the new regions
conquered by its arms, or discovered by its adventure. If this is the
progress of crime during the days of its prosperity, what is it
likely to become in those of its decline, when this prodigious vent
for superfluous numbers has come to be in a great measure closed, and
this unheard-of wealth and prosperity has ceased to gladden the land?
[Footnote 1: See No. 343, _Blackwood's Magazine_, p. 534, Vol. lv.]
To discover to what causes this extraordinary increase of crime is to
be ascribed, we must first examine the localities in which it has
principally arisen, and endeavour to ascertain whether it is to be
found chiefly in the agricultural, pastoral, or manufacturing
districts. We must then consider the condition of the labouring
classes, and the means provided to restrain them in the quarters
where the progress of crime has been most alarming; and inquire
whether the existing evils are insurmountable and unavoidable, or
have arisen from the supineness, the errors, and the selfishness of
man. The inquiry is one of the most interesting which can occupy the
thoughts of the far-seeing and humane; for it involves the temporal
and eternal welfare of millions of their fellow-creatures;--it may
well arrest the attention of the selfish, and divert for a few
minutes the profligate from their pursuits; for on it depends whether
the darling wealth of the former is to be preserved or destroyed, and
the exciting enjoyments of the other arrested or suffered to
continue.
To elucidate the first of these questions, we subjoin a table,
compiled 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 more 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 ignorance
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, selfishness, and infatuation.
[Footnote 2: Table showing the number of committments for serious
crimes, and population, in the year 1841, in the under-mentioned
counties of Great Britain;--