that it induces twenty and thirty thousand persons to yield implicit
obedience to the commands of an unknown committee, who have power to
force them to do what the Sultan Mahmoud, or the Committee of Public
Safety, never ventured to attempt--to abstain from labour, and endure
want and starvation for months together, for an object of which they
often in secret disapprove--it may be conceived how wide-spread and
fatal is the confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and
insubordination thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a
course of years afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal
commitments, and the number of young persons of both sexes, who,
loosened by these protracted periods of idleness, never afterwards
regain habits of regularity and industry. Nor is the evil lessened by
the blind infatuation with which it is uniformly regarded by the
other classes of the community, and the obstinate resistance they
make to all measures calculated to arrest the violence of these
combinations, in consequence of the expense with which they would
probably be attended--a supineness which, by leaving the coast
constantly clear to the terrors of such associations, and promising
impunity to their crimes, operates as a continual bounty on their
recurrence.

[Footnote 7:

Commitments:--
Lanarkshire. Lancashire. Staffordshire. Yorkshire.
1836 451 2,265 686 1,252
1837[8] 565 2,809 909 1,376
1841 513 3,987 1,059 1,895
1842[9] 696 4,497 1,485 2,598