Excess of Population and Increase of Crime [pp. 134-138]

EXCESS OF POPULATION.
was there, and judging from thex.rosy checks, and portly frames
of the officiating Bishops, the cloth still retains the monkish taste
for choice brands, and stands in no need of a royal prank to
revive its palate.
CARTE BLANCHE.
ART. IV.-EXCESS OF POPULATION AND INCREASE OF CRItME
AND PAUPERISM.
THE social phenomena of our day differ very widelyfrom those
of any former period of which history gives account. In all
preceding ages, and in all countries, governments have ever been
solicitous to multiply the number of their people, and have sedulously employed every means and agency which they deemed
useful or necessary to promote that end, never dreaming that the
day might come, when excess of population should become the
master evil of the times, and the problem how to diminish it, or
to prevent future increase, should torture the brains of lawgivers,
statesmen and philosophers, and still remain as insoluble as the
middle of the sphinx.
A still more perplexing and alarming phenomenon is presented
in the facts, that in this day so remarkable for its many new inventions, all directly tending to lessen the labor and facilitate the
means of making a subsistence, and thereby diminishing the temptation to crime, that there should be more of pauperism and more
of crime than at any former period of the world's history, and
that crime and pauperism abound most in the most enlightened,
industrious, wealthy and progressive countries, and are increasing in just those countries most rapidly. Worse than this, that
these evils exist almost solely among the working-class; the class
that alone produces all wealth, private and public, and that speeds
the car of human progress, only to be crushed under its wheels.
Surely such alarming phenomena must arrest the attention of all
considerate men, for they are portentous of evil to all men. In
some way we must discover and apply a remedy and corrective
for these evils, or all Christian society will be swamped and
swallowed up very soon in the gulf of anarchy. Outside of
Christian society, no such phenomena present themselves. Nor
have they existed hitherto in Russia and our South, but now that
abolition has elevated those two countries to an equal platform
with the rest of Christendom, we must be willing to accept the
great blessing of universal liberty with the little incidental evils
and drawbacks of excessive population, greatly increased crime
and pauperism, with the grossest inequalities of social and pecuniary status, consoling ourselves with the comfortable assurance,
that nevertheless, we are all equals, or at least'ill be, so soon as
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