manufacturing and mining districts, must be evident to all from this
circumstance, well known to all who are practically conversant with
the subject, but to a great degree unattended to by the majority of
men, and that is,--that the prodigious stream of depravity and
corruption which prevails, is far from being equally and generally
diffused through society, even in the densely peopled districts where
it is most alarming, but is in a great degree confined to the _very
lowest class_. It is from that lowest class that nine-tenths of the
crime, and nearly all the professional crime, which is felt as so
great an evil in society, flows. Doubtless in all classes there are
some wicked, many selfish and inhumane men; and a beneficent Deity,
in the final allotment of rewards and punishments, will take largely
into account both the opportunities of doing well which the better
classes have abused, and the almost invincible causes which so often
chain, as it were, the destitute to recklessness and crime. But
still, in examining the classes of society on which the greater part
of the crime comes, it will be found that at least three-fourths,
probably nine-tenths, comes from the very lowest and the most
destitute. It is incorrect to say crime is common among them; in
truth, among the young at least, a tendency to it is there all but
universal. If we examine who it is that compose this dismal
substratum, this hideous _black band of society_, we shall find that
it is not made up of any one class more than another--not of factory
workers more than labourers, carters, or miners--but is formed by an
aggregate of the most unfortunate or improvident of _all classes_,
who, variously struck down from better ways by disease, vice, or
sensuality, are now of necessity huddled together by tens of
thousands in the dens of poverty, and held by the firm bond of
necessity in the precincts of contagion and crime. Society in such
circumstances resembles the successive bands of which the imagination