rime being more
thoroughly detected in the former situation than the latter. For, in
the first place, in several of the greatest manufacturing counties,
particularly Lanarkshire in Scotland, there is no police at all; and
the criminal establishment is just what it was forty years ago. In
the next place, a police force is the _consequence_ of a previous
vast accumulation or crime, and is never established till the risk to
life and insecurity to property had rendered it unbearable. Being
always established by the voluntary assessment of the inhabitants,
nothing can be more certain than that it never can be called into
existence but by such an increase of crime as has rendered it a
matter of necessity.

We are far, however, from having approached the whole truth, if we
have merely ascertained, upon authentic evidence, that crime is
greatly more prevalent in the manufacturing than the rural districts.
That will probably be generally conceded; and the preceding details
have been given merely to show the extent of the difference, and the
rapid steps which it is taking. It is more material to inquire what
are the causes of this superior profligacy of manufacturing to rural
districts; and whether it arises unavoidably from the nature of their
respective employments, or is in some degree within the reach of
human amendment or prevention.

It is usual for persons who are not practically acquainted with the
subject, to represent manufacturing occupations as necessarily and
inevitably hurtful to the human mind. The crowding together, it is
said, young persons, of different sexes and in great numbers, in the
hot atmosphere and damp occupations of factories or mines, is
necessarily destructive to morality, and ruinous to regularity of
habit. The passions are excited by proximity of situation or indecent
exposure; infant labour early emancipates the young from parental
control; domestic subordination, the true foundation for social
virtue, is destroyed; the young exposed to temptation before they
have acquired strength to resist it; and vice spreads the more
extensively from the very magnitude of the establishments on which
the manufacturing greatness of the country depends. Such views are
generally entertained by writers on the social state of the country;
and being implicitly adopted by the bulk of the community, the nation
has abandoned itself to a sort of despair on the subject, and
regarding manufacturing districts as the nece