r the brutal
and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man 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
per cent. of the whole; and 4,094 in Middlesex, including London, or more
than 13 per cent. 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 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 Engla