nks over
Government,[127] that they hurriedly got the Legislature to pass an act
practically authorizing a suspension of specie payments. The
consequences were appalling. "Thousands of manufacturing, mercantile,
and other useful establishments in the United States," reported a New
York Senate Committee, "have been broken down or paralyzed by the
existing crisis.... In all our great cities numerous individuals, who,
by a long course of regular business, had acquired a competency, have
suddenly been reduced, with their families to beggary."[128] New York
City was filled with the homeless and unemployed. In the early part of
1838 one-third of all the persons in New York City who subsisted by
manual labor, were wholly or substantially without employment. Not less
than 10,000 persons were in utter poverty, and had no other means of
surviving the winter than those afforded by the charity of neighbors.
The almshouses and other public and charitable institutions overflowed
with inmates, and 10,000 sufferers were still uncared for.

The prevailing system, as was pointed out even by the conventional and
futile reports of legislative committees, was one inevitably calculated
to fill the country with beggars, vagrants and criminals. This important
fact was recognized, although in a remote way, by De Beaumont and De
Tocqueville who, however, had no fundamental understanding of the deep
causes, nor even of the meaning of the facts which they so accurately
gathered. In their elaborate work on the penitentiary system in the
United States, published in 1833, they set forth that it was their
conclusion that in the four States, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut
and Pennsylvania, the prison system of which they had fully
investigated, almost all of those convicted for crimes from 1800 to 1830
were convicted for offenses against property. In these four States,
collectively, with a population amounting to one-third of that of the
Union, not less than 91.29 out of every 100 convictions were for crimes
against property, while only 8.66 of every 100 were for crimes against
persons, and 4.05 of every 100 were for crimes against morals. In New
York State singly, 93.56 of every 100 convictions were for crimes
against property and 6.26 for crimes against persons.[129]

PROPERTY AND CRIME.

Thus we see from these figures filled with such tragic eloquence, the
economic impulse working at bottom, and the property system corrupting
every form o