If the past increase and present amount of crime in the British islands be alone considered, it must afford grounds for the most melancholy forebodings. When we recollect that since the year 1805, that is, during a period of less than forty years, in the course of which population has ad

the days of its prosperity, what is it likely to become in those of its decline, when this prodigious vent for superfluous numbers has come to be in a great measure closed, and this unheard-of wealth and prosperity has ceased to gladden the land?

To discover to what causes this

Great Britain and Ireland, crime in England has increased seven hundred per cent, in Ireland about eight hundred per cent, and in Scotland above three thousand six hundred per cent ;* it is difficult to say what is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase of the numbers of the people. Nor is the alarming nature of the prospect diminished by the reflection, that this astonishing increase in human depravity has taken place during a period of unexampled prosperity and unprecedented progress, during which the produce of the national industry had tripled, and the labours of the husbandman kept pace with the vast increase in the population they were to feed-in which the British empire carried its victorious arms into every quarter of the globe, and colonies sprang up on all sides with unheardof rapidity-in which a hundred thousand emigrants came ultimately to migrate every year from the parent state into the new regions conquered by its arms, or discovered by its adventure. If this is the progress of crime during

be ascribed, we must first examine the localities in which it has principally arisen, and endeavour to ascertain whether it is to be found chiefly in the agricultural, pastoral, or manufacturing districts. We must then consider the condition of the labouring classes, and the means provided to restrain them in the quarters where the progress of crime has been most alarming; and inquire whether the existing evils are insurmountable and unavoidable, or have arisen from the supineness, the errors, and the selfishness of man. The inquiry is one of the most interesting which can occupy the thoughts of the far-seeing and humane; for it involves the temporal and eternal welfare of millions of their fellow-creatures;-it may well arrest the attention of the selfish, and divert for a few minutes the profligate from their pursuits; for on it depends whether the darling wealth of the former is to be preserved or destroyed, and the exciting enjoyments of the other arrested or suffered to continue.

To elucidate the first of these questions, we subjoin a table, compiled

A