No. CCCXLV. JULY, 1844. VOL. LVI.

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CAUSES OF THE INCREASE OF CRIME.

If the past increase and present amount of crime in the British
islands be alone considered, it must afford grounds for the most
melancholy forebodings. When we recollect that since the year 1805,
that is, during a period of less than forty years, in the course of
which population has advanced about sixty-five _per cent_ in Great
Britain and Ireland, crime in England has increased seven hundred per
cent, in Ireland about eight hundred per cent, and in Scotland above
_three thousand six hundred per cent_;[1] it is difficult to say what
is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the
progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase of the
numbers of the people. Nor is the alarming nature of the prospect
diminished by the reflection, that this astonishing increase in human
depravity has taken place during a period of unexampled prosperity
and unprecedented progress, during which the produce of the national
industry had tripled, and the labours of the husbandman kept pace
with the vast increase in the population they were to feed--in which
the British empire carried its victorious arms into every quarter of
the globe, and colonies sprang up on all sides with unheard-of
rapidity--in which a hundred thousand emigrants came ultimately to
migrate every year from the parent state into the new regions
conquered by its arms, or discovered by its adventure. If this is the
progress of crime during the days of its prosperity, what is it
likely to become in those of its decline, when this prodigious vent
for superfluous numbers has come to be in a great measure closed, and
this unheard-of wealth and prosperity has ceased to gladden the land?

[Footnote 1: See No. 343, _Blackwood's Magazine_, p. 534, Vol. lv.]

To discover to what causes this extraordinary increase of crime is to
be ascribed, we must first examine the localities in which it has
principally arisen, and endeavour to ascertain whether it is to be
found chiefly in the agricultural, pastoral, or manufacturing
districts. We must then consider the condition of the labouring
classes, and the means provided to restrain them in the quarters
where the progress of crime has been most alarming; and inquire
whether the existing evils are insurmountable and unavoidable, or
have arisen from the supineness, the errors, a