nd, 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