such a view of so very serious a matter either
justified by reason, or warranted by a durable regard to self-interest?
Considered in reference only to immediate advantage, and with a view to
avert the much-dreaded evil of an assessment, is it expedient to allow
crime to go on increasing at the fearful rate which it has done in this
country during the last forty years? Can we regard without disquietude
the appalling facts demonstrated by the Parliamentary returns of
population and commitments--that the people are augmenting three times
as fast in the manufacturing as the agricultural districts--that
detected and punished crime is multiplying in the former three times as
fast as the people--and crime really committed three times as much as
that which is brought to light? What can be expected from a state in
which crime, in the manufacturing districts, is thus increasing
TWENTY-SEVEN TIMES _as fast as mankind in the rural_? From what sources
does this overflowing stream of recklessness, profligacy, and misery,
which overflows our workhouses and fills our jails, mainly spring, but
from this prodigious and unrestrained increase of crime and depravity
among the working classes in the manufacturing districts? Must not such
a state of things lead to a constant augmentation of poor-rates, county
rates, and jail assessments? And how short-sighted is the policy which
allows these oppressive burdens to go on constantly increasing, merely
from terror of incurring additional expense in striving to arrest them,
and hopes to avoid danger, like the partridge, by putting its head in
the bush, and ceasing to look it in the face?

But most of all, in a public and political view, is this extraordinary
increase of crime in our manufacturing districts, a subject of serious
and anxious consideration to all classes in the state. It is in vain to
seek to conceal, it is folly to attempt to deny, that in the dense
masses of the manufacturers the real danger of Great Britain is to be
found. Though not amounting, upon the whole, to more than a tenth part
of the nation, they are incomparably the most alarming from their close
proximity to each other, the fierce passions which the revolutionary
press has long nourished among them, and the perfect organization which,
under the direction Of the leaders of their trades' unions, they have
long attained. The insurrection in the manufacturing districts of
England, and violent strikes in Scotland in 1842, ma