greatest difficulty which those practically acquainted with the
subject experience in such an investigation, is to make people
believe their statements, even when founded on the most extensive
practical knowledge, or the more accurate statistical inquiry. There
is such a prodigious difference between the condition of mankind and
the progress of corruption in the agricultural or pastoral, and
manufacturing or densely peopled districts, that those accustomed to
the former will not believe any statements made regarding the latter.
They say they are incredible or exaggerated; that the persons who
make them are _têtes montées_; that their ideas are very vague, and
their suggestions utterly unworthy the consideration either of men of
sense or of government. With such deplorable illusions does ignorance
repel the suggestions of knowledge; theory, of experience;
selfishness, of philanthropy; cowardice, of resolution. Thus nothing
whatever is done to remedy or avert the existing evils: the districts
not endangered unite as one man to resist any attempt to form a
general system for the alleviation of misery or diminution of crime
in those that are, and the preponderance of the unendangered
districts in the legislature gives them the means of effectually
doing so. The evils in the endangered districts are such, that it is
universally felt they are beyond the reach of local remedy or
alleviation. Thus, between the two, nothing whatever is done to
arrest, or guard against, the existing or impending evils. Meanwhile,
destitution, profligacy, sensuality, and crime, advance with
unheard-of rapidity in the manufacturing districts, and the dangerous
classes there massed together combine every three or four years in
some general strike or alarming insurrection, which, while it lasts,
excites universal terror, and is succeeded, when suppressed, by the
same deplorable system of supineness, selfishness, and infatuation.