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    294 EMIGRATION AS A PREVENTIVE AGENC^.

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    Matory Since Movement The Above , Was It...

    poverty alternates with , fullness , and idleness with exertion , arising _; from the greater fluctuations in the distribution of employment and

    wealth among a population maintained at its highest by the attractions of these , the element of ignorance is to a great extent

    withdrawn , but the other elements preponderate so largely as to turn the scale completely against the former . Yet it is not necessary to prove

    that ignorance is a cause of crime . Let any one study the composition of the population of several districts relatively to their

    criminality , and they will find , as was admirably brought out at Liverpool , that where the aggregate of ignorance , density of

    population , poverty , and drunkenness was greatest , there crime was greatest ) and it is at the aggregate of causes that the reformatory movement

    strikes and not at the removal of any one of them . Take the outcast and vagrant child into the Ragged School , feed his already

    keenly awakened intellectual faculty with lessons of heavenly truth _, and of worldly wisdom , which , it is happily no longer the fashion to

    despise , and train him to habits of continuous labor ; you cannot say ' I know that child -will grow up an honest manwhile left on

    the streets lie would infallibly have grown up a thief , ' , but you know that you have increased the first chance and diminished the other a

    hundredfold . So with the entire movement : no one can say , under a thoroughly carried out reformatory system , that crime will

    rapidly decrease down to its lowest point , or that it will recede from the reformatory movement and go on increasing in an alarming

    ratio , but you have increased the first probability and diminished the other in the same degree . Two solitary but bitter opponents

    ( Mr . Elliott of London and Mr . Campbell of Liverpool ) stood alone at Liverpool in condemning , not any flaws in the working of the

    system , but the system itself . Mr . Campbell acknowledged a decrease of crime , but maintained that it could be accounted for in various

    ways , the chief of these being good harvests and extensive emigration . It was too soon , he saidto trace the effects of reformatories . This

    , is true , as it must be of any great experimental work yet in pror gress , and all social work is experimental more or less , but its

    principles have been approved and a sample at least offered of its results . Again , he said , the attempt to elevate the lowest strata of

    society was utterly futile , and most dangerous to the class immediately above it , by holding out an inducement to take the last step

    and become criminals . He knew he should be in a minority in such an assemblage of sentimental philanthropists , but as a cold-blooded

    economist he had come to that conclusion . All these systems had a tendency to make people do everything in the mass and nothing

    by individual exertion , which was most socially injurious . To come to the more practical question of individual exertion ,

    which is thus said to be hindered by the operations of societies . The want of individual exertion is to be seen and much to be

    lamented , brit the question is , would easy it be increased if the societies

    . were to withdraw their operations ? Have . not the societies by

    294 Emigration As A Preventive Agenc^.

    294 _EMIGRATION AS A PREVENTIVE AGENC _^ .

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Jan. 1, 1859, page 294, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01011859/page/6/