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. {131a} In the whole of England to-day the proportion is 1:  660; {131b} though it is scarcely ten years since Gaskell’s book appeared!

These facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring any one, 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 notice, and been condemned by a Justice of the Peace to resume work; that in Salford a couple of boys had been caught stealing, and a bankrupt tradesman tried to cheat his creditors.  From the neighbouring towns the reports are more detailed:  in Ashton, two thefts, one burglary, one suicide; in Bury, one theft; in Bolton, two thefts, one revenue fraud; in Leigh, one theft; in Oldham, one strike for wages, one theft, one fight between Irish women, one non-Union hatter assaulted by Union men, one mother beaten by her son, one attack upon the police, one robbery of a church; in Stockport, discontent of working-men with wages, one theft, one fraud, one fight, one wife beaten by her husband; in Warrington, one theft, one fight; in Wigan, one theft, and one robbery of a church.  The reports of the London papers are much worse; frauds, thefts, assaults, family quarrels crowd one another.  A Times of September 12, 1844, falls into my hand, which gives a report of a single day, including a theft, an attack upon the police, a sentence upon a father requiring him to support his illegitimate son, the abandonment of a child by its parents, and the poisoning of a man by his wife.  Similar reports are to be found in all the English papers.  In this country, social