Synopsis
Excerpt from The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 183: Or Critical Journal: For January, 1896; ..April, 1896; To Be Continue Quarterly
According to the late Sir Archibald Alison, one house in every ten in Glasgow in 1838 was a Spirit shop.
It was natural that such conditions as those which we have just described should have led to a large increase of crime. In 1837, the first year of the reign, persons were committed for trial in England and Wales. In the fifth year of the reign the committals rose to In 1893 the number was reduced to The population had nearly doubled in the interval; the committals had diminished by 60 per cent. It is no doubt true that a change in the law, which has enabled magistrates to deal summarily with offences, which in former days they would have been compelled to send for trial, has had its influence on these statistics. We, therefore, purposely support them with others. According to Sir E. Du Cane, the convict population of Great Britain consisted in 1833 - four years before the reign began - of persons. The population literally doubled in the succeeding sixty years, while the convict population was in the same time gradually reduced to prisoners, and to perhaps others on tickets of leave.
The increase of crime at the beginning of the reign was partly attributable to the defective machinery for dealing with it. It is difficult, at the present time, to realise that when the Queen came to the throne no effective police force existed in any part of Great Britain except the metropolis. The constabulary forces in Manchester and Birmingham were only constituted in 1839, while in the same year Par liament passed a permissive Act enabling the magistrates of any county, if they thought proper to do so, to constitute a local police. While, therefore, poverty was organised against property, property had no effective means of defending itself against the attack. In such circumstances, it was not very surprising that crime increased. The committals, we have already said, exceeded in 1837, and rose in the fifth year of the Queen's reign to Happily, after 1842, the horrible tide again began to ebb, and the committals gradually decreased. But, if we recollect that 1842 was the date at which crime and pauperism both attained their actual maxima, we shall probably be justified in regarding it as the most melancholy year which England has passed through during the nineteenth century.
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Excerpt from The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 183: Or Critical Journal: For January, 1896; ..April, 1896; To Be Continue Quarterly The year which. is just commencing promises to be famous in English history. In the course of the ensuing summer Her Majesty will complete the fifty-ninth year of her reign; in the course of the following autumn she will have reigned for a longer period than any monarch who has ever occupied the throne of these islands. A reign of nearly sixty years - a period almost covering two generations - is in itself sufficiently remarkable. But the length of the Queens reign, noteworthy as it is, is the least memorable thing about it. In no other sixty years of the world's history - we might almost say in no six hundred years of the world's history - has there been so much moral and material progress as the people of this country have experienced since the Queen came to the throne. Let us try, in the narrow limits of an article, to recapitulate some of the more striking features in this progress; and let us take, in the first instance, the population of our own islands. When the Queen came to the throne there were some 26,000,000 persons living in the United Kingdom, nearly 18,000,000 of whom were in Great Britain and 8,000,000 of whom were in Ireland. In the middle of the present year there will probably be some 39,500,000 persons in these islands, of whom 35,000,000 will be in Great Britain, and 4,500,000 in Ireland. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections succe
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