Art. II.—MORTALITY AND CRIME.

It is not generally known, although the fact has been sufficiently demonstrated by different vital statisticians, that great annual mortality is accompanied by a proportionate increase of births, so that the population is kept at its usual average even if it does not increase. One effect of this mortality and increase of births is the disproportion between the numbers of the young, the improvident, and the thoughtless, and the older, more prudent and considerate. Mr. Slaney, in his report on Birmingham and other towns, made to the commissioners for inquiry into the state of large towns and populous districts, after referring to Mr. Chadwick’s exposure of the popular fallacy, that the sufferings caused by disease, especially among the poor, restrained the increase of population, says: “I have constantly observed, wherever the mortality was high in close, narrow, neglected courts and alleys, there the children swarmed, as if to fill up the places; and it has been demonstrated again and again, that a high mortality in an increasing country, only leads to a great increase of births.” After this preliminary notice, the reader will be able to understand the force of the following remarks on the connection between mortality, (including, of course, its physical and moral causes,) and crime.

Mr. Slaney contrasts the two classes or kinds of inhabitants of the same city, in the one of which the annual mortality is but two, and in the other four per cent. “We shall find the rate of mortality one great criterion of comfort, therefore, of contentment, of good conduct, of moral habits, of intelligence, docility, usefulness and value.”

“In the one case we shall find a population having little to complain of, ready to attend to advice, having had time to learn and to think, having experience from lengthened life, and being valuable subjects, docile and industrious, possessing their chief safe-guard against tumults or disorders, ‘the hope of improving their condition.’ In the other will be found a body, consisting in a great measure of the young, who cannot repay their support; a large proportion of the rest will be inexperienced, untaught, untried, having had no time to learn or to think. All will be more or less reckless, and hard in mind and conduct; they have been formed by the cautious course of circumstances around them; poison to the mind, to the body, has been the course of their only education. Their maxim will be the heathen maxim of old, ‘Eat and drink, to-morrow we die;’ forced by their necessities to labor, experience and wisdom will be wanting; they will not husband their wages, but seek for excitement in intemperance, or low sensual indulgences; their consumption of spirits will be ten times that of the happier class. The gratification of their animal passions will be their chief object; illicit connections will be formed; early ill assorted marriages will take place without any chance of provision for offspring; there will arise multitudes of sickly and neglected children, pressing into the place of those early victims just departed, and to be cut off by the same melancholy process; and thus the scene revolves. This class will eagerly join in mobs or disturbances, partly for the sake of excitement, and because they have not that security for good conduct—the hope of improving their condition.”

Dr. Lyon Playfair, one of the commissioners, in his report on the large town in Lancashire, remarks: “The tendency to crime is increased by the comparatively few old and experienced men left to counteract the haste and inexperience of youth. In the recent mobs in Lancashire, the great majority of the rioters were found to consist of persons just emerging from boyhood; the absence of elderly persons among them was a matter of common remark. Mr. Combe has observed, that the comparative paucity of aged and cautious persons is the cause of the inconsiderate and turbulent movements in America. The obstacles in the spread of education are, also, connected with these causes.”

Dr. Playfair said previously, “The facts exhibited in the preceding sections, will, I apprehend, convincingly show, that a crowded and unhealthy district, with all its inevitable accompaniments of low morals and low intelligence—where the condition of human beings is scarcely above that of animals—where appetite and instinct occupy the place of the higher feelings—where the lowest means of support encourage the most improvident and early marriages,—is not the place where we shall find a diminishing or even stationary population. For the early unions there, are followed by early offspring; and although more than half that offspring may be swept away by disease during early infancy, yet nearly a third of it will grow up, in spite of all the surrounding evils, to follow in the steps of their parents, and in their turn to continue a race ignorant, miserable and immoral as themselves.” In a note, Dr. Playfair makes the following estimate. “If we suppose a district of 50,000 inhabitants, with births as 1 in 22, and deaths as 1 in 33—a ratio not actually as unfavorable as that of Holme—a little calculation will show that, by the end of twelve years, the population will have swollen it to nearly 60,000!”

Sameness of the Causes of Crime and of Disease.—Dr. Lyon Playfair, in the report already referred to, says expressly: “All the experience acquired during this inquiry, points out that one immediate effect of the operation of morbific causes, even when not present in sufficient intensity to produce direct disease, is to create an appetite for vicious indulgences. It is too common a mistake to transpose the effect for the cause, and to ascribe the disease to the indulgence of those passions, which, in the first place, were created by the low sanatory state of the district.”

To the same purport are the pointed conclusions of Mr. Slaney. He had just been describing the low class of dwellings of the poor and the wretched, and the self-interest of small capitalists to prefer the erection of these to ones of a better description. He goes on to say:

“I have endeavored to describe some of the evils arising from the want of proper sanatory regulations in many of these crowded and neglected places. They may be summed up as follows:

“1st. Shortening the duration of the lives of the community.

“2nd. Disease, suffering and inability to work on the part of many who survive—the cause of great cost to the country.

“3d. Crimes, theft, and the loss of property, which the police constantly point out as arising from these neglected classes.

“4th. Riots, disturbances and drunkenness, which may generally be traced to the same class of persons, often to the same place.

“5th. Great injury to the education of the poor, which is constantly neutralized in its good effects by the neglect and evils they see around them. The same observation applies to the inestimable advantages of religion and of attendance on religious worship.

“6th. Great discontent in some, and sluggish apathy in others, producing recklessness of conduct, indifference, and want of attachment to the institutions of our country.

“7th. The loss in the humbler classes of the cheapest, best and most enduring pleasures, viz., those arising from the kindly influence of the domestic relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters—this pure source of happiness derived from mutual kindness, attachment and good offices—is, amid the hardening and disgusting scenes described, almost destroyed.

“Amid such scenes, the children become hardened, careless of cleanliness, unused to order, and all the benefits derived from the best education which may be given, is destroyed by the constant evil examples they see around their homes. This is especially the case with the female sex, who, if early tainted by the disgusting scenes existing in the places described, and by the want of all decency and self-respect there exhibited, become at a future day, the nursing mothers of vice and wretchedness, instead of inculcating the household virtues.”

The sameness of the causes of diseases and of crime, are clearly indicated by the Rev. Mr. Clay in his report in the borough of Preston, as where he says:—

“A map of the town has been made, shaded in those districts which are ill ventilated, drained and cleaned; the increased depth of tint indicating a proportionate degree of dirtiness, &c. The number of deaths in the respective streets is also given, every blue spot representing a death from fever or epidemic disease, and the red spots showing the frequency of death from other disorders. The residences of persons charged with offences during the last year are also indicated, and the whole tends to show, that dirt, disease and crime are concurrent.”

Overcrowding and Defective Ventilation.—Dr. Southwood Smith, in his evidence before the commissioners for “Inquiring into the state of large towns and populous districts,” adduces the following painful, but yet instructive observations. We reproduce them here, not merely as a warning against a remote, or even a threatened evil, but with the hope of stimulating our fellow-citizens to the adoption of such measures as shall eradicate similar nuisances too near their own doors.

“I wish particularly,” Dr. S. Smith states, “to draw attention to the importance of having a certain number of rooms in the dwelling-houses of the poor, though I am aware of the difficulty of legislating on this matter, and of the still greater difficulty of carrying out practically what the legislature may declare to be its intention and will. Still it is right, that the attention of the legislature and other public bodies should be called to the physical deterioration and moral degradation, which results from the want of proper room in the dwelling-houses of the poor. Besides the evidence on this subject, which has been published in the report on the sanitary condition of the laboring population, a large mass of evidence to the same effect will be found in the reports of the sub-commissioners under the Children’s Employment Commission, and in the statements of a great number of witnesses examined by them. Instances such as the following are given: ‘A mother and her son, being an adult, sleep in the same bed. Grown-up females and unmarried young men sleep in the same room. A man, his wife, and his wife’s sister, the latter being an adult, sleep together in the same bed.’ I have myself seen, a young man, twenty years of age, sleeping in the same bed with his sister, a young woman, sixteen or seventeen years old. That incestuous intercourse takes place under these circumstances, there is too much reason to believe; and that when unmarried young men and women sleep together in the same room, the women become common to the men, is stated as a positive fact; but I regard another inevitable effect of this state of things as no less pernicious; it is one of the instances which, for want of a better term, may be called unhumanizing, because it tends to weaken and destroy the feelings and affections which are distinctive of the human being, and which raise him above the level of the brute. I have sometimes checked myself in the wish, that men of high station and authority, would visit these abodes of the less fortunate fellow-creatures, and witness with their own eyes the scenes presented there; for I have thought the same end might be answered in a way less disagreeable to them. They have only to visit the Zoological Gardens, and observe the state of society in that large room, which is appropriated to a particular class of animals, where every want is relieved, and every appetite and passion gratified, in full view of the whole community. In the filthy and crowded streets, in our large towns and cities, you see human faces retrograding, sinking down to the level of those brute tribes; and you find manners appropriate to the degradation. Can any one wonder that there is among these classes of the people so little intelligence—so slight an approach to humanity—so total an absence of domestic affection, and of moral and religious feeling? The experiment has been long tried on a large scale with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration, that if, from early infancy, you allow human beings to live like brutes, you can degrade them down to their level, leaving to them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human minds and hearts.”

Dr. Lyon Playfair adduces instances of the crowding of persons in the same room, without even the plea of necessity. They are not, he informs us, the most extreme cases of the kind.[3]

In Preston, out of 442 dwellings examined in unhealthy localities, and inhabited at the time of the inquiry by 2400 persons sleeping in 852 beds, it appeared that

In84cases4persons sleptin thesame bed,
In28“5“““
In13“6“““
In3“7“““
In1“8“““

“Amidst the dirt and disease of filthy back courts and alleys, vices and crimes are lurking,” says the Rev. Mr. Clay, “altogether unimagined by those who have never visited such abodes.” The inspectors of prisons in Scotland, from separate inquiries, have also come to the conclusion, that the physical causes of disease, indirectly become the causes of crime.

Public Lodging Houses, are another prolific source of disease and vice. They are, in nearly all large cities, the nightly resorts not only of the migrating laborer, and travelling artisan, but, also, of the lower mendicants, thieves, and prostitutes. These resorts are well known to the criminal police. In 1831, Mr. James knew a house of this description in London, to contain 126 persons, many of them women and children, and perhaps not more than a dozen beds in the place. At the census of 1841, there were not more than 30 to 40 in any of these houses; “still these numbers crowd the houses most annoyingly.” It is no uncommon thing, as we learn from Dr. Duncan, (Report on the Sanatory State of Liverpool,) for the keepers of lodging houses to cover the floor with straw, and allow as many human beings as can manage to pack themselves together, to take up their quarters for the night, at the charge of a penny each. The havoc made by the cholera in the lodging houses at Manchester, in 1832, was terrible. In some of these houses, as many as 6 or 8 beds were contained in a single room, which are crowded promiscuously with men, women, and children. Dr. Howard, after showing the lamentable extent to which they become the hot-beds of febrile diseases of the most violent and fatal character, owing mainly to their filthy and unventilated condition, thus describes the morals of their frequenters, and their malign influence in this way on the young and inexperienced. “They serve as open receptacles of crime, vice, and profligacy, and as nurseries in which the young and yet uninitiated, become familiar with every species of immorality. They are the haunts of the most depraved and abandoned characters, as well as the most miserable and suffering objects of the town, (Manchester,) and constitute one of the most influential causes of the physical and moral degradation of our laboring population.”

Unless we are misinformed, the investigations now making by the Board of Health of Philadelphia, will reveal a state of things, not much behind, although on a smaller scale, those described in the foregoing extracts; and as regards New York, Dr. Griscom’s report, made a few years ago, exhibits a still darker picture. With the warnings on the other side of the Atlantic to deter us, we ought to have kept clear of these nuisances entirely. Let us, as we have imitated the people of Great Britain for evil, imitate them also for good, by instituting the same searching inquiries into the nature and extent of these physical and moral corruptions, that are recorded in the proceedings of the various Parliamentary committees and Royal Commissioners.

In Glasgow, the lodging houses have been subjected to regular municipal supervision and ordinance, and, as we are told, with excellent effects.