rapid steps which it is taking. It is more material to inquire what
are the causes of this superior profligacy of manufacturing to rural
districts; and whether it arises unavoidably from the nature of their
respective employments, or is in some degree within the reach of
human amendment or prevention.

It is usual for persons who are not practically acquainted with the
subject, to represent manufacturing occupations as necessarily and
inevitably hurtful to the human mind. The crowding together, it is
said, young persons, of different sexes and in great numbers, in the
hot atmosphere and damp occupations of factories or mines, is
necessarily destructive to morality, and ruinous to regularity of
habit. The passions are excited by proximity of situation or indecent
exposure; infant labour early emancipates the young from parental
control; domestic subordination, the true foundation for social
virtue, is destroyed; the young exposed to temptation before they
have acquired strength to resist it; and vice spreads the more
extensively from the very magnitude of the establishments on which
the manufacturing greatness of the country depends. Such views are
generally entertained by writers on the social state of the country;
and being implicitly adopted by the bulk of the community, the nation
has abandoned itself to a sort of despair on the subject, and
regarding manufacturing districts as the necessary and unavoidable
hotbed of crimes, strives only to prevent the spreading of the
contagion into the rural parts of the country.

There is certain degree of truth in these observations; but they are
much exaggerated, and it is not in these causes that the principal
sources of the profligacy of the manufacturing districts is to be
found.