ts a few years past, one person out of
every fourteen males, and one out of every twenty-eight females, was
arraigned for criminal offenses. According to the census of 1850, there
were in the _State_ of Massachusetts, in a population of nine hundred
and ninety-four thousand five hundred and fourteen, the number of seven
thousand two hundred and fifty convictions for crime. In Virginia, the
same year, in a population of one million four hundred and twenty-one
thousand six hundred and sixty-one, there were one hundred and seven
convictions for crime.

In the _State_ of New York the proportion of crime is about the same as
in Massachusetts. In the _city_ of New York, in 1848 or 1849, there were
sentenced to the _State Prison_ one hundred and nineteen men and
seventeen women; to the _Penitentiary_ seven hundred men and one hundred
and seventy women; to the _City Prison_ one hundred and sixty-two men
and sixty-seven women--making a total of one thousand two hundred and
thirty-five criminals. Here is an amount of crime in a single city, that
equals all in the fifteen slave States together. In the _State_ of New
York, according to the census of 1850, there was, in a population of
three million and ninety-seven thousand three hundred and four, the
number of ten thousand two hundred and seventy-nine convictions for
crime; while in South Carolina, in a population of six hundred and
sixty-eight thousand five hundred and seven, (which is considerably over
one-fifth) there were only forty-six convictions for crime.

To live in cities filled with such an amount of poverty and criminal
degradation, as the census discloses, at the North, standing armies of
policemen, firemen, etc., are absolutely necessary to secure the people
against lawless violence. Now subtract from the products of labor the
_cost_ of city life--the cost of vain and criminal indulgences, the
_support_ of _paupers_, and the _machinery_ to guard innocence and
punish crime--and the wonder ceases that wealth accumulates slowly--the
wonder is that it accumulates at all. What is accumulated, must be
principally from commerce and manufactures. The system of abandoning the
country and congregating in cities, tends directly to concentrate wealth
into the hands of a few, and to diffuse poverty and crime among the
masses of the people.

These facts of poverty and crime at the North, which are exhibited by
the census, will help to explain the seeming mystery that the South