y can neither darn a stocking nor sew on a
button. As to making porridge or washing a handkerchief, the thing is
out of the question. Their food is cooked out of doors by persons who
provide the lodging-houses in which they dwell--they are clothed from
head to foot, like fine ladies, by milliners and dressmakers. This is
not the result of fashion, caprice, or indolence, but of the entire
concentration of their faculties, mental and corporeal, from their
earliest years, in one limited mechanical object. They are unfit to
be any man's wife--still more unfit to be any child's mother. We hear
little of this from philanthropists or education-mongers; but it is,
nevertheless, not the least, because the most generally diffused,
evil connected with our manufacturing industry.

But by far the greatest cause of the mass of crime of the
manufacturing and mining districts of the country, is to be found in
the prodigious number of persons, especially in infancy, who are
reduced to a state of destitution, and precipitated into the very
lowest stations of life, in consequence of the numerous ills to which
all flesh--but especially all flesh in manufacturing communities--is
heir. Our limits preclude the possibility of entering into all the
branches of this immense subject; we shall content ourselves,
therefore, with referring to one, which seems of itself perfectly
sufficient to explain the increase of crime, which at first sight
appears so alarming. This is the immense proportion of _destitute
widows with families_, who in such circumstances find themselves
immovably fixed in places where they can neither bring up their
children decently, nor get away to other and less peopled localities.

From the admirable statistical returns of the condition of the
labouring poor in France, prepared for the _Bureau de l'Interieure_,
it appears that the number of widows in that country amounts to the
enormous number of 1,738,000.[10] This, out of a population now of
about 34,000,000, is as nearly as possible _one in twenty_ of the
entire population! Population is advancing much more rapidly in Great
Britain than France; for in the former country it is doubling in
about 60 years, in the latter in 106. It is certain, therefore, that
the proportion of widows must be greater in this country than in
France, especially in the manufacturing districts, where early
marriages, from the ready employment for young children, are so
frequent; and early deaths,