Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 4

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