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 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