manufacturing places. It now distinctly appears that crime is greatly
more prevalent in proportion to the numbers of the people in densely
peopled than thinly inhabited localities, and that it is making far
more rapid progress in the former situation than the latter.
Statistics are not to be despised when they thus, at once and
decisively, disprove errors so assiduously spread, maintained by
writers of such respectability, and supported by such large and
powerful bodies in the state.

Nor can it be urged with the slightest degree of foundation, that
this superior criminality of the manufacturing and densely peopled
districts is owing to a police force being more generally established
than in the agricultural or pastoral, and thus crime being more
thoroughly detected in the former situation than the latter. For, in
the first place, in several of the greatest manufacturing counties,
particularly Lanarkshire in Scotland, there is no police at all; and
the criminal establishment is just what it was forty years ago. In
the next place, a police force is the _consequence_ of a previous
vast accumulation or crime, and is never established till the risk to
life and insecurity to property had rendered it unbearable. Being
always established by the voluntary assessment of the inhabitants,
nothing can be more certain than that it never can be called into
existence but by such an increase of crime as has rendered it a
matter of necessity.

We are far, however, from having approached the whole truth, if we
have merely ascertained, upon authentic evidence, that crime is
greatly more prevalent in the manufacturing than the rural districts.
That will probably be generally conceded; and the preceding details
have been given merely to show the extent of the difference, and the