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Untitled Article
These observations are so just , that they cannot with plausibility be questioned , and so momentous , that they cannot with safety be disregarded . His Lordship refers to Parliamentary documents in proof of the increase of crime , and avails himself of them in adverting to the causes of the evil , and in suggesting : measures by which it may be checked or obviated .
One cause , which he assigns , is the want of employment , and , consequently , of the power of obtaining a sufficient maintenance by honest labour . Now we doubt whether this be a leading and very fruitful cause of the accelerated progress of crime : for we fear that the majority of persons committed , at least for first offences , are precisely those who might earn a sufficient maintenance by honest labour if they would .
He then enumerates well-known and unquestionable causes of crime , which are severally at work in the manufacturing districts , and in the agricultural counties . Among these causes , he does not overlook the diminished attention in families to the religious and moral character of their male and female dependants—and the greatly increased luxury and consequent domestic neglect on the part of the heads of households . Here , as appears to us , he touches with particular success a main source of " the overflowings of ungodliness . " The interposition of the magistrate , and of human laws , is more than equivocal , is worse than needless , when contrasted with the agency of personal religious principle in domestic and social life . It is material to remember that
< s The very alterations and improvements of the laws have tended—especially at first—to add to the list of commitments by facilitating detection , and that actions have been stamped with guilt , and justly too , which escaped before . " Although the progress of crime has not been quite so rapid in the four counties * included , as to the whole or the greater part of each of them , within the see of Lichfield and Coventry as in some others , amounting to about one-fourth , while the correspondent increase through the whole kingdom reaches one-third of the original number of commitments at the commencement of the last seven years , still " the number has more than trebled that of seventeen years before . "
The means of thorough change and reformation , according to his Lordship , are the increase of accommodation in churches , especially for the lower classes , the extension and improvement of education for the youthful poor , and , above all , the steady and earnest devotion of the whole body of the
clergy . On these points he oners statements and illustrations well meriting the special regard of those to whom they are immediately addressed . We cannot , however , dismiss here the awfully interesting subject of the increase of crime—its sources and its remedies . Our readers , we are persuaded , will receive with their accustomed candour some additional observations on a state of things so alarming and unprecedented . Let us then compare this situation of the country with the profession of religion among us , and with circumstances belonging to our domestic and social manners . At first sight , it is wonderful and deeply mortifying , that a period during which we hear so much of religion , during which so much is attempted for
* Staffordshire , Warwickshire , Derbyshire , Shropshire—for the most part , a manufacturing district .
Untitled Article
Bkhop of Lichfield ' s Charge . . 77
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1829, page 77, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2569/page/5/
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