1821. 1831. 1841.
Pop. Com. Pop. Com. Pop. Com.
Middlesex, 1,144,531 2,480 1,358,330 3,514 1,576,636 3,586
Lancashire, 1,052,859 1,716 1,336,854 2,352 1,667,054 3,987
Staffordshire, 345,895 374 410,512 644 510,504 1,059
Yorkshire, 801,274 757 976,350 1,270 1,154,111 1,895
Glamorgan, 101,737 28 126,612 132 171,188 189
Lanark, 244,387 ... 316,849 470 426,972 513
Renfrew, 112,175 ... 133,443 205 155,072 505
Forfar, 113,430 ... 139,666 124 l70,520 333
--PORTER'S _Parl. Tables, and Census_ 1841.]
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.
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 out-stripped 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.[5] Authentic evidence
proves, that not less than _two millions_ of persons have, in this
way, been transferred to the manufacturing counties of the north of
England within the last forty years, chiefly from the agricultural
counties of the south of that kingdom, or from Ireland. Not less than
three hundred and fifty thousand persons have, during the same
period, migrated into the two manufacturing counties of Lanark and
Renfrew alone, in Scotland, chiefly from the Scotch Highlands, or
north of Ireland. No such astonishing migration of the human species
in so short a time, and to settle on so small a space, is on record
in the whole annals of the world. It is unnecessary to say that the
increase is to be ascribed chiefly, if not entirely, to immigration;
for it is well known that such is the unhealthiness of manufacturing
towns, especially to young children, that, so far from being able to
add to their numbers, they are hardly ever able, without extraneous
addition, to maintain them.
[Footnote 5: Table showing the Population in 1801, 1891, and 1841, in
the under-mentioned counties of Great Britain.
Increase in
1801 1821 1841 forty years.
Lancashire, 672,731 1,052,859 1,667,054 994,323
Yorkshire, W.R., 565,282 801,274 1,154,101 588,819
Staffordshire, 233,153 343,895 510,504 277,351
Nottingham, 140,350 186,873 249,910 109,560
Warwick, 208,190 274,322 401,715 193,155
Gloucester, 250,809 335,843 431,383 180,574
2,070,515 2,995,066 4,412,667 2,343,782
Lanark, 146,699 244,387 434,972 288,273
Renfrew, 78,056 112,175 155,072 77,016
224,755 356,562 590,044 365,289
--_Census of_ 1841. Preface, p. 8 and 9.]
Various causes have combined to produce demoralization among the vast
crowd, thus suddenly attracted, by the alluring prospect of high
wages and steady employment, from the rural to the manufacturing
districts. In the first place, they acquired wealth before they had
learned how to use it, and that is, perhaps, the most general cause
of the rapid degeneracy of mankind. High wages flowed in upon them
before they had acquired the artificial wants in the gratification of
which they could be innocently spent. Thence the general recourse to
the grosser and sensual enjoyments, which are powerful alike on the
savage and the sage. Men who, in the wilds of Ireland or the
mountains of Scotland, were making three or four shillings a-week, or
in Sussex ten, suddenly found themselves, as cotton-spinners,
iron-moulders, colliers, or mechanics, in possession of from twenty
to thirty shillings. Meanwhile, their habits and inclinations had
undergone scarce any alteration; they had no taste for comfort in
dress, lodging, or furniture; and as to laying by money, the thing,
of course, was not for a moment thought of. Thus, this vast addition
to their incomes was spent almost exclusively on eating and drinking.
The extent to which gross sensual enjoyment was thus spread among
these first settlers in the regions of commercial opulence, is
incredible. It is an ascertained fact, that above a million a-year is
annually spent in Glasgow on ardent spirits;[6] and it has recently
been asserted by a respectable and intelligent operative in
Manchester, that, in that city, 750,000 _more_ is annually spent on
beer and spirits, than on the purchase of provisions. Is it
surprising that a large part of the progeny of a generation which has
embraced such habits, should be sunk in sensuality and profligacy,
and afford a never-failing supply for the prisons and transport
ships? It is the counterpart of the sudden corruption which
invariably overtakes northern conquerors, when they settle in the
regions of southern opulence.
[Footnote 6: ALISON _on Population_, ii. Appendix A.]
Another powerful cause which promotes the corruption of men, when
thus suddenly congregated together from different quarters in the
manufacturing districts, is, that the restraints of character,
relationship, and vicinity are, in a great measure, lost in the
crowd. Every body knows what powerful influence public opinion, or
the opinion of their relations, friends, and acquaintances, exercises
on all men in their native seats, or when living for any length of
time in one situation. It forms, in fact, next to religion, the most
powerful restraint on vice, and excitement to virtue, that exists in
the world. But when several hundred thousand of the working classes
are suddenly huddled together in densely peopled localities, this
invaluable check is wholly lost. Nay, what is worse, it is rolled
over to the other side; and forms an additional incentive to
licentiousness. The poor in these situations have no neighbours who
care for them, or even know their names; but they are surrounded by
multitudes who are willing to accompany them in the career of
sensuality. They are unknown alike to each other, and to any persons
of respectability or property in their vicinity. Philanthropy seeks
in vain for virtue amidst thousands and tens of thousands of unknown
names; charity itself is repelled by the hopelessness of all attempts
to relieve the stupendous mass of destitution which follows in the
train of such enormous accumulation of numbers. Every individual or
voluntary effort is overlooked amidst the prodigious multitude, as it
was in the Moscow campaign of Napoleon. Thus the most powerful
restraints on human conduct--character, relations, neighbourhood--are
lost upon mankind at the very time when their salutary influence is
most required to enable them to withstand the increasing temptations
arising from density of numbers and a vast increase of wages.
Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion. Isolation
ensures concealment without adding to resolution. This is the true
cause of the more rapid deterioration of the character of the poor
than the rich, when placed in such dense localities. The latter have
a neighbourhood to watch them, because their station renders them
conspicuous--the former have none. Witness the rapid and general
corruption of the higher ranks, when they get away from such
restraint, amidst the profligacy of New South Wales.
In the foremost rank of the causes which demoralize the urban and
mining population, we must place the frequency of those strikes which
unhappily have now become so common as to be of more frequent
occurrence than a wet season, even in our humid climate. During the
last twenty years there have been six great strikes: viz. in 1826,
1828, 1834, 1837, 1842, and 1844. All of these have kept multitudes
of the labouring poor idle for months together. Incalculable is the
demoralization thus produced upon the great mass of the working
classes. We speak not of the actual increase of commitments during
the continuance of a great strike, though that increase is so
considerable that it in general augments them in a single year from
thirty to fifty per cent.[7] We allude to the far more general and
lasting causes of demoralization which arise from the arraying of one
portion of the community in fierce hostility against another, the
wretchedness which is spread among multitudes by months of compulsory
idleness, and the not less ruinous effect of depriving them of
_occupation_ during such protracted periods. When we recollect that
such is the vehemence of party feeling produced by these disastrous
combinations, that it so far obliterates all sense of right and wrong
as generally to make their members countenance contumely and insult,
sometimes even robbery, fire-raising, and murder, committed on
innocent persons who are only striving to earn an honest livelihood
for themselves by hard labour, but in opposition to the strike; and
that it induces twenty and thirty thousand persons to yield implicit
obedience to the commands of an unknown committee, who have power to
force them to do what the Sultan Mahmoud, or the Committee of Public
Safety, never ventured to attempt--to abstain from labour, and endure
want and starvation for months together, for an object of which they
often in secret disapprove--it may be conceived how wide-spread and
fatal is the confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and
insubordination thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a
course of years afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal
commitments, and the number of young persons of both sexes, who,
loosened by these protracted periods of idleness, never afterwards
regain habits of regularity and industry. Nor is the evil lessened by
the blind infatuation with which it is uniformly regarded by the
other classes of the community, and the obstinate resistance they
make to all measures calculated to arrest the violence of these
combinations, in consequence of the expense with which they would
probably be attended--a supineness which, by leaving the coast
constantly clear to the terrors of such associations, and promising
impunity to their crimes, operates as a continual bounty on their
recurrence.
[Footnote 7:
Commitments:--
Lanarkshire. Lancashire. Staffordshire. Yorkshire.
1836 451 2,265 686 1,252
1837[8] 565 2,809 909 1,376
1841 513 3,987 1,059 1,895
1842[9] 696 4,497 1,485 2,598
PORTER'S _Parl. Tables_, xi. 162.--_Parl. Paper of Crime_,
1843, p. 53.]
[Footnote 8: Strike.]
[Footnote 9: Strike.]
Infant labour, unhappily now so frequent in all kinds of factories,
and the great prevalence of female workers, is another evil of a very
serious kind in the manufacturing districts. We do not propose to
enter into the question, recently so fiercely agitated in the
legislature, as to the practicability of substituting a compulsory
ten-hours' bill for the twelve hours' at present in operation.
Anxious to avoid all topics on which there is a difference of opinion
among able and patriotic men, we merely state this prevalence and
precocity of juvenile labour in the manufacturing and mining
districts as _a fact_ which all must deplore, and which is attended
with the most unhappy effects on the rising generation. The great
majority, probably nine-tenths, of all the workers in cotton-mills or
printfields, are females. We have heard much of the profligacy and
licentiousness which pervade such establishments; but though that may
be too true in some cases, it is far from being universal, or even
general; and there are numerous instances of female virtue being as
jealously guarded and effectually preserved in such establishments,
as in the most secluded rural districts. The real evils--and they
follow universally from such employment of juvenile females in great
numbers in laborious but lucrative employment--are the emancipation
of the young from parental control, the temptation held out to
idleness in the parents from the possibility of living on their
children, and the disqualifying the girls for performing all the
domestic duties of wives and mothers in after life.
These evils are real, general, and of ruinous consequence. When
children--from the age of nine or ten in some establishments, of
thirteen or fourteen in all--are able to earn wages varying from 3s.
6d. to 6s. a-week, they soon become in practice independent of
parental control. The strongest of all securities for filial
obedience--a sense of dependence--is destroyed. The children assert
the right of self-government, because they bear the burden of
self-maintenance. Nature, in the ordinary case, has effectually
guarded against this premature and fatal emancipation of the young,
by the protracted period of weakness during childhood and
adolescence, which precludes the possibility of serious labour being
undertaken before the age when a certain degree of mental firmness
has been acquired. But the steam-engine, amidst its other marvels,
has entirely destroyed, within the sphere of its influence, this
happy and necessary exemption of infancy from labour. Steam is the
moving power; it exerts the strength; the human machine is required
only to lift a web periodically, or damp a roller, or twirl a film
round the finger, to which the hands of infancy are as adequate as
those of mature age. Hence the general employment of children, and
especially girls, in such employments. They are equally serviceable
as men or women, and they are more docile, cheaper, and less given to
strikes. But as these children earn their own subsistence, they soon
become rebellious to parental authority, and exercise the freedom of
middle life as soon as they feel its passions, and before they have
acquired its self-control.
If the effect of such premature emancipation of the young is hurtful
to them, it is, if possible, still more pernicious to their parents.
Labour is generally irksome to man; it is seldom persevered in after
the period of its necessity has passed. When parents find that, by
sending three or four children out to the mills or into the mines,
they can get eighteen or twenty shillings a-week without doing any
thing themselves, they soon come to abridge the duration and cost of
education, in order to accelerate the arrival of the happy period
when they may live on their offspring, not their offspring on them.
Thus the purest and best affections of the heart are obliterated on
the very threshold of life. That best school of disinterestedness and
virtue, the _domestic hearth_, where generosity and self-control are
called forth in the parents, and gratitude and affection in the
children, from the very circumstance of the dependence of the latter
on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than destroyed, it is made
the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists only to nourish
the selfish and debasing passions. Children come to be looked on, not
as objects of affection, but as instruments of gain; not as forming
the first duty of life and calling forth its highest energies, but as
affording the first means of relaxing from labour, and permitting a
relapse into indolence and sensuality. The children are, practically
speaking, sold for slaves, and--oh! unutterable horror!--_the sellers
are their own parents_! Unbounded is the demoralization produced by
this monstrous perversion of the first principles of nature. Thence
it is that it is generally found, that all the beneficent provisions
of the legislature for the protection of infant labour are so
generally evaded, as to render it doubtful whether any law, how
stringent soever, could protect them. The reason is apparent. The
parents of the children are the chief violators of the law; for the
sake of profit they send them out, the instant they can work, to the
mills or the mines. Those whom nature has made their protectors, have
become their oppressors. The thirst for idleness, intoxication, or
sensuality, has turned the strongest of the generous, into the most
malignant of the selfish passions.
The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women, are
not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in
life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating
mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up
utterly ignorant of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of
reading or writing, but of ignorance in still more momentous
particulars, with reference to their usefulness in life as wives and
mothers. They can neither bake nor brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit.
The finest London lady is not more utterly inefficient than they are,
for any other object but the one mechanical occupation to which they
have been habituated. They can neither darn a stocking nor sew on a
button. As to making porridge or washing a handkerchief, the thing is
out of the question. Their food is cooked out of doors by persons who
provide the lodging-houses in which they dwell--they are clothed from
head to foot, like fine ladies, by milliners and dressmakers. This is
not the result of fashion, caprice, or indolence, but of the entire
concentration of their faculties, mental and corporeal, from their
earliest years, in one limited mechanical object. They are unfit to
be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any child's mother. We hear
little of this from philanthropists or education-mongers; but it is,
nevertheless, not the least, because the most generally diffused,
evil connected with our manufacturing industry.
But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the
manufacturing and mining districts of the country, is to be found in
the prodigious number of persons, especially in infancy, who are
reduced to a state of destitution, and precipitated into the very
lowest stations of life, in consequence of the numerous ills to which
all flesh--but especially all flesh in manufacturing communities--is
heir. Our limits preclude the possibility of entering into all the
branches of this immense subject; we shall content ourselves,
therefore, with referring to one, which seems of itself perfectly
sufficient to explain the increase of crime, which at first sight
appears so alarming. This is the immense proportion of _destitute
widows with families_, who in such circumstances find themselves
immovably fixed in places where they can neither bring up their
children decently, nor get away to other and less peopled localities.
From the admirable statistical returns of the condition of the
labouring poor in France, prepared for the _Bureau de l'Intérieure_,
it appears that the number of widows in that country amounts to the
enormous number of 1,738,000.[10] This, out of a population now of
about 34,000,000, is as nearly as possible _one in twenty_ of the
entire population! Population is advancing much more rapidly in Great
Britain than France; for in the former country it is doubling in
about 60 years, in the latter in 106. It is certain, therefore, that
the proportion of widows must be greater in this country than in
France, especially in the manufacturing districts, where early
marriages, from the ready employment for young children, are so
frequent; and early deaths, from the unhealthiness of employment or
contagious disorders, are so common. But call the proportion the
same: let it be taken at a twentieth part of the existing population.
At this rate, the two millions of strangers who, during the last
forty years, have been thrown into the four northern counties of
Lancaster, York, Stafford, and Warwick, must contain at this moment
_a hundred thousand widows_. The usual average of a family is two and
a half children--call it two only. There will thus be found to be
200,000 children belonging to these 100,000 widows. It is hardly
necessary to say, that the great majority, probably four-fifths of
this immense body, must be in a state of destitution. We know in what
state the fatherless and widows are in their affliction, and who has
commanded us to visit them. On the most moderate calculation,
250,000, or an eighth of the whole population, must be in a state of
poverty and privation. And in Scotland, where, during the same period
of forty years, 350,000 strangers have been suddenly huddled together
on the banks of the Clyde, the proportion may be presumed to be the
same; or, in other words, _thirty thousand_ widows and orphans are
constantly there in a state deserving of pity, and requiring support,
hardly any of whom receive more from the parish funds than _a
shilling a-week_, even for the maintenance of a whole family.
The proportion of widows and orphans to the entire population, though
without doubt in some degree aggravated by the early marriages and
unhealthy employments incident to manufacturing districts, may be
supposed to be not materially different in one age, or part of the
country, from another. The widow and the orphan, as well as the poor,
will be always with us; but the peculiar circumstance which renders
their condition so deplorable in the dense and suddenly peopled
manufacturing districts is, that the poor have been brought together
in such prodigious numbers that all the ordinary means of providing
for the relief of such casualties fails; while the causes of
mortality among them are periodically so fearful, as to produce a
vast and sudden increase of the most destitute classes altogether
outstripping all possible means of local or voluntary relief. During
the late typhus fever in Glasgow, in the years 1836 and 1837, above
30,000 of the poor took the epidemic, of whom 3300 died.[11] In the
first eight months of 1843 alone, 32,000 persons in Glasgow were
seized with fever.[12] Out of 1000 families, at a subsequent period,
visited by the police, in conjunction with the visitors for the
distribution of the great fund raised by subscription in 1841, 680
were found to be widows, who, with their families, amounted to above
2000 persons all in the most abject state of wretchedness and
want.[13] On so vast a scale do the causes of human destruction and
demoralization act, when men are torn up from their native seats by
the irresistible magnet of commercial wealth, and congregated
together in masses, resembling rather the armies of Timour and
Napoleon than any thing else ever witnessed in the transactions of
men.
[Footnote 10: _Statistique de la France, publiée par le
Gouvernement_, viii. 371-4. A most splendid work.]
[Footnote 11: Fever patients, Glasgow, 1836, 37.
Fever patients. Died.
1836, . . 10,092 . 1187
1837, . . 21,800 . 2180
------ ----
31,892 3367
--COWAN'S _Vital Statistics of Glasgow_, 1388, p 8, the work of a
most able and meritorious medical gentleman now no more.]
[Footnote 12: Dr Alison on the Epidemic of 1843, p. 67.]
[Footnote 13: Captain Millar's Report, 1841, p. 8.]
Here, then, is the great source of demoralization, destitution, and
crime in the manufacturing districts. It arises from the sudden
congregation of human beings in such fearful multitudes together,
that all the usual alleviations of human suffering, or modes of
providing for human indigence, entirely fail. We wonder at the rapid
increase of crime in the manufacturing districts, forgetting that a
squalid mass of two or three hundred thousand human beings are
constantly precipitated to the bottom of society in a few counties,
in such circumstances of destitution that recklessness and crime
arise naturally, it may almost be said unavoidably, amongst them. And
it is in the midst of such gigantic causes of evil--of causes arising
from the extraordinary and unparalleled influx of mankind into the
manufacturing districts during the last forty years, which can bear a
comparison to nothing but the collection of the host with which
Napoleon invaded Russia, or Timour and Genghis Khan desolated
Asia--that we are gravely told that it is to be arrested by education
and moral training; by infant schools and shortened hours of labour;
by multiplication of ministers and solitary imprisonment! All these
are very good things; each in its way is calculated to do a certain
amount of good; and their united action upon the whole will
doubtless, in process of time, produce some impression upon the
aspect of society, even in the densely peopled manufacturing
districts. As to their producing any immediate effect, or in any
sensible degree arresting the prodigious amount of misery,
destitution, and crime which pervades them, you might as well have
tried, by the schoolmaster, to arrest the horrors of the Moscow
retreat.
That the causes which have now been mentioned are the true sources of
the rapid progress of crime and general demoralization of our
manufacturing and mining districts, must be evident to all from this
circumstance, well known to all who are practically conversant with
the subject, but to a great degree unattended to by the majority of
men, and that is,--that the prodigious stream of depravity and
corruption which prevails, is far from being equally and generally
diffused through society, even in the densely peopled districts where
it is most alarming, but is in a great degree confined to the _very
lowest class_. It is from that lowest class that nine-tenths of the
crime, and nearly all the professional crime, which is felt as so
great an evil in society, flows. Doubtless in all classes there are
some wicked, many selfish and inhumane men; and a beneficent Deity,
in the final allotment of rewards and punishments, will take largely
into account both the opportunities of doing well which the better
classes have abused, and the almost invincible causes which so often
chain, as it were, the destitute to recklessness and crime. But
still, in examining the classes of society on which the greater part
of the crime comes, it will be found that at least three-fourths,
probably nine-tenths, comes from the very lowest and the most
destitute. It is incorrect to say crime is common among them; in
truth, among the young at least, a tendency to it is there all but
universal. If we examine who it is that compose this dismal
substratum, this hideous _black band of society_, we shall find that
it is not made up of any one class more than another--not of factory
workers more than labourers, carters, or miners--but is formed by an
aggregate of the most unfortunate or improvident of _all classes_,
who, variously struck down from better ways by disease, vice, or
sensuality, are now of necessity huddled together by tens of
thousands in the dens of poverty, and held by the firm bond of
necessity in the precincts of contagion and crime. Society in such
circumstances resembles the successive bands of which the imagination
of Dante has framed the infernal regions, which contain one
concentric circle of horrors and punishments within another, until,
when you arrive at the bottom, you find one uniform mass of crime,
blasphemy and suffering.
We are persuaded there is no person practically acquainted with the
causes of immorality and crime in the manufacturing districts, who
will not admit that these are the true ones; and that the others,
about which so much is said by theorists and philanthropists, though
not without influence, are nevertheless trifling in the balance. And
what we particularly call the public attention to is this--Suppose
all the remedies which theoretical writers or practical legislators
have put forth and recommended, as singly adequate to remove the
evils of the manufacturing classes, were to be in _united_ operation,
they would still leave these gigantic causes of evil untouched. Let
Lord Ashley obtain from a reluctant legislature his ten-hours' bill,
and Dr Chalmers have a clergyman established for every 700
inhabitants; let church extension be pushed till there is a chapel in
every village, and education till there is a school in every street;
let the separate system be universal in prisons, and every criminal
be entirely secluded from vicious contamination; still the great
fountains of evil will remain unclosed; still 300,000 widows and
orphans will exist in a few counties of England amidst a newly
collected and strange population, steeped in misery themselves, and
of necessity breeding up their children in habits of destitution and
depravity; still the poor will be deprived, from the suddenness of
their collection, and the density of their numbers, of any effective
control, either from private character or the opinion of
neighbourhood; still individual passion will be inflamed, and
individual responsibility lost amidst multitudes; still strikes will
spread their compulsory idleness amidst tens of thousands, and
periodically array the whole working classes under the banners of
sedition, despotism, and murder; still precocious female labour will
at once tempt parents into idleness in middle life, and disqualify
children, in youth, for household or domestic duties. We wish well to
the philanthropists: we are far from undervaluing either the
importance or the utility of their labours; but as we have hitherto
seen no diminution of crime whatever from their efforts, so we
anticipate a very slow and almost imperceptible improvement in
society from their exertions.
Strong, and in many respects just, pictures of the state of the
working classes in the manufacturing districts, have been lately put
forth, and the _Perils of the Nation_ have, with reason, been thought
to be seriously increased by them. Those writers, however, how
observant and benevolent soever, give a partial, and in many respects
fallacious view, of the _general_ aspect of society. After reading
their doleful accounts of the general wretchedness, profligacy, and
licentiousness of the working classes, the stranger is astonished, on
travelling through England, to behold green fields and smiling
cottages on all sides; to see in every village signs of increasing
comfort, in every town marks of augmented wealth, and the aspect of
poverty almost banished from the land. Nay, what is still more
gratifying, the returns of the sanatary condition of the whole
population, though still exhibiting a painful difference between the
health and chances of life in the rural and manufacturing districts,
present unequivocal proof of a general amelioration of the chances of
life, and, consequently, of the general wellbeing of the whole
community.
How are these opposite statements and appearances to be reconciled?
Both are true--the reconciliation is easy. The misery, recklessness,
and vice exist chiefly in one class--the industry, sobriety, and
comfort in another. Each observer tells truly what he sees in his own
circle of attention; he does not tell what, nevertheless, exists, and
exercises a powerful influence on society, of the good which exists
in the other classes. If the evils detailed in Lord Ashley's
speeches, and painted with so much force in the _Perils of the
Nation_, were universal, or even general, society could not hold
together for a week. But though these evils are great, sometimes
overwhelming in particular districts, they are far from being
general. Nothing effectual has yet been done to arrest them in the
localities or communities where they arise; but they do not spread
much beyond them. The person engaged in the factories are stated by
Lord Ashley to be between four and five hundred thousand: the
population of the British islands is above 27,000,000. It is in the
steadiness, industry, and good conduct of a large proportion of this
immense majority that the security is to be found. Observe that
industrious and well-doing majority; you would suppose there is no
danger:--observe the profligate and squalid minority; you would
suppose there is no hope.
At present about 60,000 persons are annually committed, in the
British islands, for serious offences[14] worthy of deliberate trial,
and above double that number for summary or police offences. A
hundred and eighty thousand persons annually fall under the lash of
the criminal law, and are committed for longer or shorter periods to
places of confinement for punishment. The number is prodigious--it is
frightful. Yet it is in all only about 1 in 120 of the population;
and from the great number who are repeatedly committed during the
same year, the individuals punished are not 1 in 200. Such as they
are, it may safely be affirmed that four-fifths of this 180,000 comes
out of two or three millions of the community. We are quite sure that
150,000 come from 3,000,000 of the lowest and most squalid of the
empire, and not 30,000 from the remaining 24,000,000 who live in
comparative comfort. This consideration is fitted both to encourage
hope and awaken shame--hope, as showing from how small a class in
society the greater part of the crime comes, and to how limited a
sphere the remedies require to be applied; shame, as demonstrating
how disgraceful has been the apathy, selfishness, and supineness in
the other more numerous and better classes, around whom the evil has
arisen, but who seldom interfere, except to RESIST all measures
calculated for its removal.
It is to this subject--the ease with which the extraordinary and
unprecedented increase of crime in the empire might be arrested by
proper means and the total inefficiency of all the remedies hitherto
attempted, from the want of practical knowledge on the part of those
at the head of affairs, and an entirely false view of human nature in
society generally, that we shall direct the attention of our readers
in a future Number.
[Footnote 14: Viz., in round numbers--
England, 30,000
Ireland, 26,000
Scotland, 4,000
60,000]