these appalling truths are demonstrated by the
parliamentary returns. In Scotland and Ireland the returns of
commitments have not been kept, until within the last twenty years, with
such accuracy as can be relied on; but they exhibit an increase still
more alarming. Ireland, as might be expected, exhibits a growth of crime
which has fully kept pace with that of England during the same period:
but Scotland exhibits a change which fairly outstrips all the others in
the race of iniquity. In 1803, Lord Advocate Hope said in Parliament,
that more crime was tried at one Quarter Sessions at Manchester than
over all Scotland in a whole year; and the proceedings of the criminal
courts to the north of the Tweed, at that period, amply demonstrated the
truth of his assertion. In the year 1805, eighty-nine criminals were
brought before the whole tribunals, supreme and inferior, in Scotland;
but in the year 1842, the committals for serious offences were nearly
four thousand--in other words, serious crime, in less than forty years,
had augmented in Scotland above THIRTY-SIX FOLD. During the same period
population has advanced about fifty per cent, viz. from 1,800,000 to
2,660,000; so that in moral, staid, and religious Scotland, serious
crime, during the last forty years, has risen TWENTY-FIVE TIMES as fast
as the number of the people.[1]

Overlooked as this prodigious change has been, as all things are which
arise gradually in this country, it has yet attracted, as well it might,
the astonishment of writers on the Continent. Nine yeas ago, M. Moreau
observed, speaking of the increase of crime in Scotland--"In the year
1805, the criminal commitments in Scotland were eighty-nine: they are
now 2864--that is, they have increased in thirty years thirty-fold. It
would appear that Scotland, in becoming a manufacturing state, has in a
great degree lost the virtue and simplicity of character by which she
was formerly distinguished."[2]

What renders this prodigious increase of crime in so short a period,
in all parts of the British Empire, in a peculiar manner extraordinary
and alarming, is, that it has taken place at the very time when
unheard-of efforts were made, in every part of the country, for the
moral and religious instruction of the people. We are very far indeed
from saying that enough has been done in this way: no one is better
aware that the vast debt, which the prosperous wealth of Britain owes in
this respect to its suffering