.

It is mainly during the elapsed half of the present century that this
change for the worse has taken place in the large towns of Scotland. In
the year 1824 it was greatly less than half accomplished; but it was
fast going on; and I saw, partially at least, the processes in operation
through which it has been effected. The cities of the country have
increased their population during the past fifty years greatly beyond
the proportion of its rural districts--a result in part of the
revolutions which have taken place in the agricultural system of the
Lowlands, and of the clearances of the Highlands; and in part also of
that extraordinary development of the manufactures and trade of the
kingdom which the last two generations have witnessed. Of the wilder
Edinburgh mechanics with whom I formed at this time any acquaintance,
less than one-fourth were natives of the place. The others were mere
settlers in it, who had removed mostly from country districts and small
towns, in which they had been known, each by his own circle of
neighbourhood, and had lived, in consequence, under the wholesome
influence of public opinion. In Edinburgh--grown too large at the time
to permit men to know aught of their neighbours--they were set free from
this wholesome influence, and, unless when under the guidance of higher
principle, found themselves at liberty to do very much as they pleased.
And--with no _general_ opinion to control--cliques and parties of their
wilder spirits soon formed in their sheds and workshops a standard of
opinion of their own, and found only too effectual means of compelling
their weaker comrades to conform to it. And hence a great deal of wild
dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable
improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite
compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure
always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady
spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in
ignorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it almost
necessarily takes its place among the lapsed classes. In the third
generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than
in the second. There is a type of even physical degradation already
manifesting itself in some of our large towns, especially among degraded
females, which is scarce less marked than that exhibited by the negro,
and which both my Edinburg