ssary and unavoidable
hotbed of crimes, strives only to prevent the spreading of the
contagion into the rural parts of the country.

There is certain degree of truth in these observations; but they are
much exaggerated, and it is not in these causes that the principal
sources of the profligacy of the manufacturing districts is to be
found.

The real cause of the demoralization of manufacturing towns is to be
found, not in the nature of the employment which the people there
receive, so much as in the manner in which they are brought together,
the unhappy prevalence of general strikes, and the prodigious
multitudes who are cast down by the ordinary vicissitudes of life, or
the profligacy of their parents, into a situation of want,
wretchedness, and despair.

Consider how, during the last half century, the people have been
brought together in the great manufacturing districts of England and
Scotland. So rapid has been the progress of manufacturing industry
during that period, that it has altogether out-stripped the powers of
population in the districts where it was going forward, and
occasioned a prodigious influx of persons from different and distant
quarters, who have migrated from their paternal homes, and settled in
the manufacturing districts, never to return.[5] Authentic evidence
proves, that not less than _two millions_ of persons have, in this
way, been transferred to the manufacturing counties of the north of
England within the last forty years, chiefly from the agricultural
counties of the south of that kingdom, or from Ireland. Not less than
three hundred and fifty thousand persons have, during the same
period, migrated into the two manufacturing counties of Lanark and
Renfrew alone, in Scotland, chiefly from the Scotch Highlands, or
north of Ireland. No such astonishing migration of the human species
in so short a time, and to settle on so small a space, is on record
in the whole annals of the world. It is unnecessary to say that the
increase is to be ascribed chiefly, if not entirely, to immigration;
for it is well known that such is the unhealthiness of manufacturing
towns, especially to young children, that, so far from being able to
add to their numbers, they are hardly ever able, without extraneous
addition, to maintain them.

[Footnote 5: Table showing the Population in 1801, 1891, and 1841, in
the under-mentioned counties of Great Britain.

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