men) give themselves no sort of trouble about the
matter: they care not though their neighbours are murdered or robbed,
plundered or swindled, so as they escape unscathed themselves; and
without either thinking on the subject, or suggesting one remedy for its
evils, interfere only, with stentorian lungs, to resist any project to
arrest them having the remotest tendency to terminate in an assessment.
Their principle is to take of civilisation only its fruits, and steadily
to withstand the concomitant evils; and the simple way by which they
think this is to be effected--is quietly, and without saying a word, to
reap the benefit of manufacturing industry in the doubling or tripling
of their incomes; but to roar out like madmen if the smallest per
centage is proposed to be laid on them, to arrest or mitigate the evils
which that industry brings in its train. Government meanwhile, albeit
fully aware of the danger, is not sufficiently strong to do any thing to
avert it; its own majority is paralysed by the inherent selfishness of
mankind; and nothing but some great and stunning public calamity can, it
is universally felt, awaken the country to a sense of the evils growing
out of its greatness, but threatening in the end to endanger its
existence. Thus nothing is done, or at least nothing effectual is done,
to avert the dangers: every one shuts his eyes to them, or opens them
only to take measures to avert an assessment; and meanwhile crime
advances with the steps of a giant, sweeping whole classes of society
into its vortex, and threatening to spread corruption and vice, in an
incredible manner, through the densest and most dangerous classes of the
community.

Authentic and irrefragable evidence of the magnitude of this danger
exists in the statistical tables of committals which have now, for a
very considerable time, been prepared in all parts of the British
empire. Since the year 1805, when regular tables of commitments first
began to be kept in England, commitments have increased _sixfold_: they
have swelled _from five to thirty-one thousand_. During the same period
population has advanced about sixty per cent: in other words, detected
crime has advanced FOUR TIMES AS FAST AS THE NUMBERS OF THE PEOPLE.
Unwilling as we are to load our pages with statistical tables--which,
attractive to the thinking few, are repulsive to the unthinking many--we
must yet request our readers to cast their eyes to the bottom of the
pages, where