s of poverty, and held by the firm bond of
necessity in the precincts of contagion and crime. Society in such
circumstances resembles the successive bands of which the imagination
of Dante has framed the infernal regions, which contain one
concentric circle of horrors and punishments within another, until,
when you arrive at the bottom, you find one uniform mass of crime,
blasphemy and suffering.

We are persuaded there is no person practically acquainted with the
causes of immorality and crime in the manufacturing districts, who
will not admit that these are the true ones; and that the others,
about which so much is said by theorists and philanthropists, though
not without influence, are nevertheless trifling in the balance. And
what we particularly call the public attention to is this--Suppose
all the remedies which theoretical writers or practical legislators
have put forth and recommended, as singly adequate to remove the
evils of the manufacturing classes, were to be in _united_ operation,
they would still leave these gigantic causes of evil untouched. Let
Lord Ashley obtain from a reluctant legislature his ten-hours' bill,
and Dr Chalmers have a clergyman established for every 700
inhabitants; let church extension be pushed till there is a chapel in
every village, and education till there is a school in every street;
let the separate system be universal in prisons, and every criminal
be entirely secluded from vicious contamination; still the great
fountains of evil will remain unclosed; still 300,000 widows and
orphans will exist in a few counties of England amidst a newly
collected and strange population, steeped in misery themselves, and
of necessity breeding up their children in habits of destitution and
depravity; still the poor will be deprived, from the suddenness of
their collection, and the density of their numbers, of any effective
control, either from private character or the opinion of
neighbourhood; still individual passion will be inflamed, and
individual responsibility lost amidst multitudes; still strikes will
spread their compulsory idleness amidst tens of thousands, and
periodically array the whole working classes under the banners of
sedition, despotism, and murder; still precocious female labour will
at once tempt parents into idleness in middle life, and disqualify
children, in youth, for household or domestic duties. We wish well to
the philanthropists: we are far from undervaluing either the