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The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme form⁠—that of offences against the law. If the influences demoralising to the workingman act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Réaumur. Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the workingman becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. Hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation has become the most criminal in the world. From the annual criminal tables of the Home Secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime in England has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity. The numbers of arrests for criminal offences reached in the years: 1805 , 4,605; 1810 , 5,146; 1815 , 7,898; 1820 , 13,710; 1825 , 14,437; 1830 ,18,107; 1835 , 20,731; 1840 , 27,187; 1841 , 27,760; 1842 , 31,309 in England and Wales alone. That is to say, they increased sevenfold in thirty-seven years. Of these arrests, in 1842 , 4,497 were made in Lancashire alone, or more than 14 percent of the whole; and 4,094 in Middlesex, including London, or more than 13 percent. So that two districts which include great cities with large proletarian populations, produced one-fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is far from forming one-fourth of the whole. Moreover, the criminal tables prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat; for, in 1842 , taking the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could neither read nor write; 58.32 read and wrote