tenth house in Glasgow was a spirit shop; the quantity of spirits drunk in Glasgow was twice or thrice as much as in any similar population on the face of the globe." The population of Glasgow was then 257,000; of these, 80,000 had hardly any religious or moral education. The people of Glasgow have not improved since the year 1838, they are now more drunken than ever; and it is stated upon good authority, that Edinburgh has become more immersed in drunkenness than Glasgow. But Glasgow has vices peculiar to itself— prostitution there has become not a vice but an abomination. By the report of Mr. Logan, a City Missionary, it appears that there were in Glasgow, in the year 1843, 3,600 prostitutes who received, as the wages of their sin, £9,900 weekly, or the annual sum of £514,800; and of these creatures 300 die annually; six years the medical officers state to be the usual term of their lives. Leeds is in a condition equally degraded; the number of prostitutes in it exceeds 1,425, and it is calculated that £4,500 are spent weekly in support of these women, making an annual sum of £218,400. In the year 1843, Mr. Logan stated that there were in Manchester about 15,000 prostitutes; and that the sum of £470,000 was spent annually in debauchery; and a medical man informed him that 250 of these girls died every year. There are, it is stated, 15,000 unfortunate females in London; 2,000 in Liverpool; 300 in Hull; 250 in Paisley, and in Dublin there were, in the year 1851, 248 common brothels, 299 houses occupied or frequented by prostitutes, the total number of those unfortunates was 1170; the numbers showing a decrease of about 100 per annum, in four years. These figures refer to the year 1843; the Police reports prove that the numbers have increased, in some instances one-half, in others one-third, within the last ten years. There are no more frightful histories of human degradation than those painted by Mayhew, Ryan, Duchâtelet, and Tait. Want is the chief source of this crime; of 5,183 courtezans in Paris, 2,696 had been cast off by relatives, 89 resorted to vice to procure sustenance; 280, impelled by shame, had forsaken their homes; 218, abandoned by their seducers, had no other mode of life to which they could turn. Alas! true it is, that want is the chief cause of these miseries. Of 1,200 sempstresses who, at his Glasgow Gallie and Fleckfield.

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request, attended Henry Mayhew's second meeting, four only, had under garments; 58 only, had blankets; 151 had no beds. We look upon this state of things, we know of its existence, and yet with it legislation never grapples. The seducer prowls abroad; the procuress, in street and in railway carriage; in the private house and in the factory; worst of all, in the Temple of the God of Purity, corrupts and destroys. Our streets are, after night-fall, no better than some town of Sparta, where ruled the antique wickedness of Lycurgus; and, as midnight tolls over our cities, the scenes witnessed in the public streets are but those of the Lupercula, with the actors clothed. It has been proved-in numberless instances, that initiation into crime may be laid to the temptation which this disgraceful condition of our towns places before our youth; thousands of cases clearly prove the fact; and when we know that ten amongst every fourteen of these women are foully diseased, we read with a shudder the terrible facts expressed by Dr. M'Cormack, when he writes

"Hideous disorders attend the unlawful commerce of the sexes, blighting the infant unborn, inducing inevitable ruin and decay. The skin, throat, bones even, do not escape. The so beautiful structure of the eye is doubly implicated, first in syphilitic iritis, then in gonorrhoal ophthalmia, that wretched malady which, as I conceive, has housed itself in Egypt, and infects our race. These disorders are at once acute and chronic, nor does one attack yield exemption from another. The evil is urgent, the very remedy is dire. Medical writings are rife with details only to be surpassed by the yet more horrible reality. Very children even are found in the lock hospitals of great cities, while millions, it may be affirmed, are lavished on the wages of debauchery. No lady, Tait asserts, dare venture abroad after dark in the streets of Edinburgh! But is Edinburgh the only city? He counts it one-fourth the annual mortality among the female victims to prostitution, this so brutish vice and utter violation of the loftier destinies of our kind. Brothels, and low lodging houses, if possible worse, subsist by hundreds in all our large towns, and there, prostitution and syphilis, the sin and the soil, go hand in hand. Forty thousand illegitimate children, according to the Registrar, are yearly born in England, besides those who perish, sometimes mother and child together, through the execrable arts of hired aborters! In London alone, two thousand women, it is said, annually replace those who die amid their sin and misery.'

The evil of this system does not stop with the immediate victims, it spreads its baleful influence over all around; and because we will not adopt the wise rule of other nations, because we will not strive to remedy our neglect, or render less noxious

those evils which nature will not suffer us to destroy, we expose ourselves to that reproach which, more than two hundred and fifty years ago, Montaigne applied to his own country when he wrote, that legislators forgot the duty of their high office, in the neglect of those small rules for the guidance of petty officials in small things, which, disregarded, become great evils. Prostitution and drunkenness move with the pace of equal progression, and those females in our factories who have worked during day till the powers of life are all but exhausted, attempt to revive their failing energies by draughts of gin and porter. Years ago, able and christian patriots wrote and spoke in favor of the factory operatives. To the energies of Sadler we owe the Report of 1833; the horrors detailed in the evidence given before the Committee of 1818 were shown in the former year to be in few particulars altered. Children-infants-are no longer sent to work, as slaves never toiled amongst the cotton fields of Alabama; but there is a moral hell in our manufacturing towns most frightful to contemplate. The Rev. Henry Worsley writes

"In Birmingham juvenile prostitution greatly prevails, the ages varying from fourteen to eighteen; none under fourteen, except one case of a child under nine years of age. These females have principally worked in the factories of the town; most of them are notorious thieves. The men who frequent the brothels, are in age from fourteen to twenty. In a district, which witness could walk in fifteen minutes, there are 118 brothels, and 42 other houses of ill fame resorted to by prostitutes. The fact of boys and girls working together in the same factories leads much to prostitution. It is the beginning, the very first step towards both prostitution and stealing. In the low brothels and lodging houses of the town, there are many juvenile prostitutes not more than thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Among the causes of prostitution we must enumerate parental concubinage; as many as 120 and often 300 men and women are found living together unmarried, in a single district of the London City Mission, comprising no more than 550 families. Parental neglect, or even parental incitation, is one of the most frequent causes of prostitution. The prison reports afford many instances in which girls under twelve or thirteen years of age have been forced into the streets in order to supply a brutalised parent with drink.”

We have stated, that owing to the total neglect of police regulations upon the subjects to which we have last referred, whole neighbourhoods are corrupted; we now assert, that by this same neglect, every feeling of common morality is outraged. Drunkenness is fostered through the licence which the law gives to prostitution, for, as that most able and most

estimable man, the Rev. Mr. Clay, writes, quoted by the Rev. Mr. Worsley —

"My last year's intercourse with the subjects of my ministry has made me acquainted with practices, resorted to in certain beer houses, which must be mentioned in order to show what demoralizing agencies are added to those already existing in them, viz.: the keeping of prostitutes. Sixteen houses in one town, harbouring, or rather maintaining, about 54 prostitutes, have been named to me. But this is not the full amount of the evil. The neighbourbood of those houses is corrupted. Women, married women, occupied to all appearance with their own proper avocations at home, hold them. selves at the call of the beer house for the immoral purposes to which I have referred."

How, it may be asked, can these vices be checked? We answer, by adopting those measures likely to render the course of life of those fallen women less glaring, less brazen in daring impudence, and by compelling them, and those who support them, to shun the public thoroughfares and public gathering places of our cities; by regulating more strictly the public houses, and the places of cheap and vicious amusement in which an incentive is held out to drunkenness; by education, and by low priced rational entertainment for the people: thus we may check drunkenness, and in checking it we lighten the criminal calendars of half the offences by which they are blackened.-Mr. Justice Wightman has observed, that four-fifths of the crimes in the kingdom are caused by "the besetting sin of drunken

"Baron Alderson has stated, that if we take away from the calendar all the cases with which drunkenness has any connec tion, they would make a large calendar a very small one. Mr. Justice Patteson has said frequently to juries, "if it were not for this drinking, you and I would have nothing to do." Mr. Justice Coleridge has stated, "that he never knew a case brought before him which was not directly or indirectly connected with intoxicating liquors ;" and one of the Scotch Justices has said, that "from the evidence brought before him, as a Judge, it seemed that every evil in Glasgow began and ended in whiskey;" and Dr. Gordon, Physician to the London Hospital, has stated, "that out of every hundred diseases, as many as sixty-five were found to be strictly attributable to the effects of ardent spirits." If these drinking houses were carefully regulated, and if the French system of Police regarding prostitution were enforced, the evil of which we have complained would be most materially lessened. The regu

lations of the French executive, upon the subject, are the fol lowing.-Brothels are suffered, by licence, to exist in certain. quarters; but at and from the period of their establishment, they are placed under the entire management, the servile yoke of a portion of the police, whose office is to guard "attentats aux mœurs." They are not permitted in the vicinity of public schools, or of a church, or, indeed, of any public institution. The keeper of the brothel is bound, within twenty-four hours, to forward to the prefecture of the police, the name, for the purpose of registration, of every young woman who may be anxious to reside in the house. The woman is then brought before the authorities, she is cautioned, warned, and is told, that if she enter upon this course of life, she must be under the surveillance of the police, and that her name once entered upon the list as une fille inscrit," must ever remain as a record of her degradation. If her youth be remarkable she is sent to the Hospital of St. Lazare, where she is employed in needle-work, and, if she be from the provinces, her parents, or the Mayor, is written to for the purpose of inducing her, through their, or his, interposition, to return to her home. If she be friendless, she is received in the hospital of St. Lazare, and if this fail, she is then suffered to place her name upon the roll, and her place of residence is numbered in the books of the prefecture; she is forced to carry with her, and to produce when required, by any person, the ticket showing the weekly medical report of her health, made by the physician appointed to inspect these houses, and the people who inhabit them. She cannot wear showy dress, and is forbidden to appear in public places, particularly in the gardens of the Luxembourg, of the Palais National, of the Tuilleries, or of the Jardin du Roi; she is on no account to appear at the windows of the house in which she may reside; and for a breach of any of these laws the punishment is imprisonment for two months. These who live quietly in this course of life are also watched by the authorities, and the fille isolée is tracked through her way of sin, and every indignity that woman can suffer is inflicted upon her by the active police.

So far we have written of the condition of Great Britain and Scotland; but our own country has its particular evils springing from, and engendered by, the peculiar moral and social state in which we exist. Our national crimes are not the foul, sensual offences common to Great Britain; agrarian outrage is