Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · February 11, 1868

Moral and Social Condition of England.

A RECENT number of the North British Review gives a fearful account of the social sins and moral rottenness of British society. The British press have much to say about the “vices of democracy,” but no description of American society presents a picture of demoralization, barbarism, incapacity and dishonesty, one-quarter as bad as the British Review depicts the condition of British society. The substance of the article is thus epitomized by the New York Post:

The reviewer tells us that justice is so slow and costly in England, that to go to law, even in a just cause, is to court ruin; that the lawless classes have been fostered and encouraged; that the criminal class is “numerous, increasing, organized, daring, skillful, and growing daily more and more formidable and audacious; that the police is inadequate, and not so clever as the rogues; that the administration of the law is such as not to deter criminals or repress crime. The criminal class is so prodigiously numerous as to amount to fourteen per thousand of the adult population; the number of persons “convicted summarily” is twenty-six in every thousand; and this though the law appears to be administered with a shocking laxness. For instance, only 27,000 persons were arrested in 1866 for 50,000 “grave” offences known to have been committed; of the 27,000 only 19,000 were sent to trial, and only 14,700 were convicted and punished. Thus nearly half of those arrested for “grave” offences escaped punishment. No wonder the criminal classes are increasing in numbers and audacity in England.

Of two hundred and seventy-two cases in which a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of murder, in only one hundred and twenty-four were persons arrested for the crime; only fifty-five were actually tried, only twenty-six were found guilty, and only twelve were executed. This would seem to show not only incapacity in the police, but carelessness, to say no worse, in the administration of the law.

The reviewer dilates upon the frauds in great mercantile transactions, and the adulteration practised by retail dealers, showing astounding recklessness and lack of conscience and honor in every rank of merchants, from the greatest to the least; and then turns to the management of the English railway system. Of the two thousand millions of dollars which the railways of England have cost, two-fifths, or eight hundred millions, he says, were “thrown away;” five hundred millions alone were paid for what is called “Parliamentary expenses,” which means lobbying charters through Parliament. “English fares are higher and English dividends lower than abroad; and while engineers, contractors, jobbing speculators and Parliamentary lawyers made large fortunes out of them, railway companies have been a source of ruin, instead of wealth, to thousands and hundreds of thousands of our innocent and unknowing countrymen.”

In municipal government the English have failed, even worse than we. Our great cities, if their people are heavily taxed, have at least, abundance of pure water, a decent police, and good order, but London and other English cities are as heavily taxed, and the result, this writer tells us, is “a complicated outcome of impure water, bad gas, streets filthy and broken up, a poisoned river and pestilential drainage, abused and neglected poor, the law insulted, conflicting jurisdictions, crime rampant, and pauperism and disease swelling and spreading year by year; while at the same time, we are paying for all these bad results heavier rates than under a wiser system would amply suffice for good ones.”

Nor is the agricultural population better off. Ignorance, squalor, filth and hopeless poverty to the most industrious, is the rule.

“In our agricultural districts a vast proportion of the working classes live in hovels where decency is difficult, and comfort and self-respect impossible, and in many of our towns, and most of all in the metropolis, the number of persons who herd together in habitations scarcely ventilated, drained imperfectly or not at all, with no water supply, and, in reference to the filth, indecency, and pestilential condition of which no language can be too unmeasured, must be reckoned by hundreds and thousands at least.