imperfectly; 6.77 could read and write well; 0.22 had enjoyed a higher education, while the degree of education of 2.34 could not be ascertained. In Scotland, crime has increased yet more rapidly. There were but 89 arrests for criminal offences in 1819 , and as early as 1837 the number had risen to 3,176, and in 1842 to 4,189. In Lanarkshire, where Sheriff Alison himself made out the official report, population has doubled once in thirty years, and crime once in five and a half, or six times more rapidly than the population. The offences, as in all civilised countries, are, in the great majority of cases, against property, and have, therefore, arisen from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal. The proportion of offences against property to the population, which in the Netherlands is as 1 ∶ 7,140, and in France, as 1 ∶ 1,804, was in England, when Gaskell wrote, as 1 ∶ 799. The proportion of offences against persons to the population is, in the Netherlands, 1 ∶ 28,904; in France, 1 ∶ 17,573; in England, 1 ∶ 23,395; that of crimes in general to the population in the agricultural districts, as 1 ∶ 1,043; in the manufacturing districts as 1 ∶ 840. In the whole of England today the proportion is 1 ∶ 660; though it is scarcely ten years since Gaskell’s book appeared!
These facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring anyone, even a bourgeois, to pause and reflect upon the consequences of such a state of things. If demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this proportion (and if English manufacture in these twenty years should be less prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? Society is already in a state of visible dissolution; it is impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing the most striking evidence of the giving way of all social ties. I look at random into a heap of English journals lying before me; there is the Manchester Guardian for October 30, 1844 , which reports for three days. It no longer takes the trouble to give exact details as to Manchester, and merely relates the most interesting cases: that the workers in a mill have struck for higher wages without giving