“Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the English working-people, and only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralizing influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naïve, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man!
“The contempt for the existing order is most conspicuous in its extreme form—that of offenses against the law. If the influences demoralizing to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Réaumur. Under the brutal and brutalizing treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. Hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation has become the most criminal in the world. From the annual criminal tables of the Home Secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime in England has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity. The number of arrests for criminal offenses reached in years: 1805, 4,605; 1810, 5,146; 1815, 7,898; 1820, 13,710; 1825, 14,437; 1830, 18,107; 1835, 20,731; 1840, 27,187; 1841, 27,760; 1842, 31,309 in England and Wales alone. That is to say, they increased seven-fold in thirty-seven years. Of these arrests, in 1842, 4,497 were made in Lancashire alone, or more than 14 per cent. of the whole; and 4,094 in Middlesex, including London, or more than 13 per cent. So that two districts which include great cities with proletarian populations, produced one fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is far from forming one fourth of the whole. Moreover, the criminal [[29]]tables prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat; for in 1842, taking the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could neither read nor write; 58.32 read and wrote imperfectly; 6.77 could read and write well; 0.22 had enjoyed a higher education, while the degree of education of 2.34 could not be ascertained. In Scotland, crime has increased yet more rapidly. There were but 89 arrests for criminal offenses in 1819, and as early as 1837 the number had risen to 3,176, and in 1842 to 4,189. In Lanarkshire, where Sheriff Alison himself made out the criminal report, the population has doubled in thirty years, and crime in five and a half, or six times more rapidly than the population. The offenses, as in all civilized countries, are, in the great majority of cases, against property. The proportion of offenses to the population, which in the Netherlands is as 1 : 7,140, and in France as 1 : 1,804, was in England, when Gaskell wrote, as 1 : 799. The proportion of offenses against persons to the population in the Netherlands, 1 : 28,904; in France, 1 : 17,537; in England, 1 : 23,395; that of crimes in general to the population in the agricultural districts, as 1 : 1,043; in the manufacturing districts as 1 : 840. (‘Manufacturing Population of England’, chap. 10.) In the whole of England today the proportion is 1 : 660; though it is scarcely ten years since Gaskell’s book appeared!”[29] [[30]]
[1] [Note to the American Edition: In my opinion, More is the first author who has noted in a scientific way the relation between criminality and economic conditions. Before him there were other authors, to whom this relationship did not remain totally unperceived; but they treated the subject by chance, as it were, and in a very superficial way. Cf. J. van Kan, “Les Causes économiques de la Criminalité”, pp. 15 ff.] [↑]