And only lately, the “Leeds Mercury” itself gave a most striking instance of ignorance among persons from Boeotian Pudsey:  of 12 witnesses, ’all of respectable appearance, examined before the Mayor of Bradford at the court-house there, only one man could sign his name, and that indifferently.’  Mr. Neison has clearly shown, in statistics of crime in England and Wales from 1834 to 1844, that crime is invariably the most prevalent in those districts where the fewest numbers in proportion to the population can read and write.  Is it not, indeed, beginning at the wrong end to try and reform men after they have become criminals?  Yet you cannot begin with children, from want of schools.  Poverty is the result of ignorance, and then ignorance is again the unhappy result of poverty.  ’Ignorance makes men improvident and thoughtless—­women as well as men; it makes them blind to the future—­ to the future of this life as well as the life beyond.  It makes them dead to higher pleasures than those of the mere senses, and keeps them down to the level of the mere animal.  Hence the enormous extent of drunkenness throughout this country, and the frightful waste of means which it involves.’  At Bilston, amidst 20,000 people, there are but two struggling schools—­one has lately ceased; at Millenhall, Darlaston, and Pelsall, amid a teeming population, no school whatever.  In Oldham, among 100,000, but one public day-school for the laboring classes; the others are an infant-school, and some dame and factory schools.  At Birmingham, there are 21,824 children at school, and 23,176 at no school; at Liverpool, 50,000 out of 90,000 at no school; at Leicester, 8,200 out of 12,500; and at Leeds itself, in 1841 (the date of the latest returns), some 9,600 out of 16,400 were at no school whatever.  It is the same in the counties.  ’I have seen it stated that a woman for some time had to officiate as clerk in a church in Norfolk, there being no adult male in the parish able to read and write.’  For a population of 17,000,000 we have but twelve normal schools; while in Massachusetts they have three such schools for only 800,000 of population.”

Poverty and ignorance produce intemperance and crime, and hence it is that both so much abound throughout England.  Infanticide, as we are told, prevails to an extent unknown in any other part of the world.  Looking at all these facts, we can readily see that the local demand for information throughout England must be very small, and this enables us to account for the extraordinary fact, that in all that country there has been no daily newspaper printed out of London.  There is, consequently, no local demand for literary talent.  The weekly papers that are published require little of the pen, but much of the scissors.  The necessary consequence of this is, that every young man who fancies he can write, must go to London to seek a channel through which he may be enabled to come before the public.  Here we have centralization