Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844. Various
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.
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.4 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.
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;5 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
Table showing the Population in 1801, 1891, and 1841, in the under-mentioned counties of Great Britain.
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ALISON