Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 9

to the entire population, though
without doubt in some degree aggravated by the early marriages and
unhealthy employments incident to manufacturing districts, may be
supposed to be not materially different in one age, or part of the
country, from another. The widow and the orphan, as well as the poor,
will be always with us; but the peculiar circumstance which renders
their condition so deplorable in the dense and suddenly peopled

manufacturing districts is, that the poor have been brought together in
such prodigious numbers that all the ordinary means of providing for
the relief of such casualties fails; while the causes of mortality among
them are periodically so fearful, as to produce a vast and sudden
increase of the most destitute classes altogether outstripping all
possible means of local or voluntary relief. During the late typhus fever
in Glasgow, in the years 1836 and 1837, above 30,000 of the poor took
the epidemic, of whom 3300 died.[11] In the first eight months of 1843
alone, 32,000 persons in Glasgow were seized with fever.[12] Out of
1000 families, at a subsequent period, visited by the police, in
conjunction with the visitors for the distribution of the great fund raised
by subscription in 1841, 680 were found to be widows, who, with their
families, amounted to above 2000 persons all in the most abject state of
wretchedness and want.[13] On so vast a scale do the causes of human
destruction and demoralization act, when men are torn up from their
native seats by the irresistible magnet of commercial wealth, and
congregated together in masses, resembling rather the armies of Timour
and Napoleon than any thing else ever witnessed in the transactions of
men.
[Footnote 10: _Statistique de la France, publiée par le Gouvernement_,
viii. 371-4. A most splendid work.]
[Footnote 11: Fever patients, Glasgow, 1836, 37.
Fever patients. Died. 1836, . . 10,092 . 1187 1837, . . 21,800 . 2180
------ ---- 31,892 3367
--COWAN'S _Vital Statistics of Glasgow_, 1388, p 8, the work of a
most able and meritorious medical gentleman now no more.]
[Footnote 12: Dr Alison on the Epidemic of 1843, p. 67.]
[Footnote 13: Captain Millar's Report, 1841, p. 8.]
Here, then, is the great source of demoralization, destitution, and crime
in the manufacturing districts. It arises from the sudden congregation of
human beings in such fearful multitudes together, that all the usual
alleviations of human suffering, or modes of providing for human
indigence, entirely fail. We wonder at the rapid increase of crime in the
manufacturing districts, forgetting that a squalid mass of two or three
hundred thousand human beings are constantly precipitated to the
bottom of society in a few counties, in such circumstances of
destitution that recklessness and crime arise naturally, it may almost be

said unavoidably, amongst them. And it is in the midst of such gigantic
causes of evil--of causes arising from the extraordinary and
unparalleled influx of mankind into the manufacturing districts during
the last forty years, which can bear a comparison to nothing but the
collection of the host with which Napoleon invaded Russia, or Timour
and Genghis Khan desolated Asia--that we are gravely told that it is to
be arrested by education and moral training; by infant schools and
shortened hours of labour; by multiplication of ministers and solitary
imprisonment! All these are very good things; each in its way is
calculated to do a certain amount of good; and their united action upon
the whole will doubtless, in process of time, produce some impression
upon the aspect of society, even in the densely peopled manufacturing
districts. As to their producing any immediate effect, or in any sensible
degree arresting the prodigious amount of misery, destitution, and
crime which pervades them, you might as well have tried, by the
schoolmaster, to arrest the horrors of the Moscow retreat.
That the causes which have now been mentioned are the true sources of
the rapid progress of crime and general demoralization of our
manufacturing and mining districts, must be evident to all from this
circumstance, well known to all who are practically conversant with the
subject, but to a great degree unattended to by the majority of men, and
that is,--that the prodigious stream of depravity and corruption which
prevails, is far from being equally and generally diffused through
society, even in the densely peopled districts where it is most alarming,
but is in a great degree confined to the very lowest class. It is from that
lowest class that nine-tenths of the crime, and nearly all the
professional crime, which is felt as so great an evil in society, flows.
Doubtless in all classes there are some wicked, many selfish and
inhumane men; and a beneficent Deity, in the final allotment of
rewards and punishments, will take largely into account both