Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 8

the
instant they can work, to the mills or the mines. Those whom nature
has made their protectors, have become their oppressors. The thirst for
idleness, intoxication, or sensuality, has turned the strongest of the

generous, into the most malignant of the selfish passions.
The habits acquired by such precocious employment of young women,
are not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in life.
Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating mechanical
employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up utterly ignorant
of any thing else. We speak not of ignorance of reading or writing, but
of ignorance in still more momentous particulars, with reference to
their usefulness in life as wives and mothers. They can neither bake nor
brew, wash nor iron, sew nor knit. The finest London lady is not more
utterly inefficient than they are, for any other object but the one
mechanical occupation to which they have been habituated. They can
neither darn a stocking nor sew on a button. As to making porridge or
washing a handkerchief, the thing is out of the question. Their food is
cooked out of doors by persons who provide the lodging-houses in
which they dwell--they are clothed from head to foot, like fine ladies,
by milliners and dressmakers. This is not the result of fashion, caprice,
or indolence, but of the entire concentration of their faculties, mental
and corporeal, from their earliest years, in one limited mechanical
object. They are unfit to be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any
child's mother. We hear little of this from philanthropists or
education-mongers; but it is, nevertheless, not the least, because the
most generally diffused, evil connected with our manufacturing
industry.
But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the manufacturing
and mining districts of the country, is to be found in the prodigious
number of persons, especially in infancy, who are reduced to a state of
destitution, and precipitated into the very lowest stations of life, in
consequence of the numerous ills to which all flesh--but especially all
flesh in manufacturing communities--is heir. Our limits preclude the
possibility of entering into all the branches of this immense subject; we
shall content ourselves, therefore, with referring to one, which seems of
itself perfectly sufficient to explain the increase of crime, which at first
sight appears so alarming. This is the immense proportion of _destitute
widows with families_, who in such circumstances find themselves
immovably fixed in places where they can neither bring up their
children decently, nor get away to other and less peopled localities.
From the admirable statistical returns of the condition of the labouring

poor in France, prepared for the _Bureau de l'Intérieure_, it appears that
the number of widows in that country amounts to the enormous number
of 1,738,000.[10] This, out of a population now of about 34,000,000, is
as nearly as possible one in twenty of the entire population! Population
is advancing much more rapidly in Great Britain than France; for in the
former country it is doubling in about 60 years, in the latter in 106. It is
certain, therefore, that the proportion of widows must be greater in this
country than in France, especially in the manufacturing districts, where
early marriages, from the ready employment for young children, are so
frequent; and early deaths, from the unhealthiness of employment or
contagious disorders, are so common. But call the proportion the same:
let it be taken at a twentieth part of the existing population. At this rate,
the two millions of strangers who, during the last forty years, have been
thrown into the four northern counties of Lancaster, York, Stafford, and
Warwick, must contain at this moment a hundred thousand widows.
The usual average of a family is two and a half children--call it two
only. There will thus be found to be 200,000 children belonging to
these 100,000 widows. It is hardly necessary to say, that the great
majority, probably four-fifths of this immense body, must be in a state
of destitution. We know in what state the fatherless and widows are in
their affliction, and who has commanded us to visit them. On the most
moderate calculation, 250,000, or an eighth of the whole population,
must be in a state of poverty and privation. And in Scotland, where,
during the same period of forty years, 350,000 strangers have been
suddenly huddled together on the banks of the Clyde, the proportion
may be presumed to be the same; or, in other words, thirty thousand
widows and orphans are constantly there in a state deserving of pity,
and requiring support, hardly any of whom receive more from the
parish funds than _a shilling a-week_, even for the maintenance of a
whole family.
The proportion of widows and orphans