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