The proportion of widows and orphans to the entire population, though without doubt in some degree aggravated by the early marriages and unhealthy employments incident to manufacturing districts, may be supposed to be not materially different in one age, or part of the country, from another. The widow and the orphan, as well as the poor, will be always with us; but the peculiar circumstance which renders their condition so deplorable in the dense and suddenly peopled manufacturing districts is, that the poor have been brought together in such prodigious numbers that all the ordinary means of providing for the relief of such casualties fails; while the causes of mortality among them are periodically so fearful, as to produce a vast and sudden increase of the most destitute classes altogether outstripping all possible means of local or voluntary relief. During the late typhus fever in Glasgow, in the years 1836 and 1837, above 30,000 of the poor took the epidemic, of whom 3300 died.[11] In the first eight months of 1843 alone, 32,000 persons in Glasgow were seized with fever.[12] Out of 1000 families, at a subsequent period, visited by the police, in conjunction with the visitors for the distribution of the great fund raised by subscription in 1841, 680 were found to be widows, who, with their families, amounted to above 2000 persons all in the most abject state of wretchedness and want.[13] On so vast a scale do the causes of human destruction and demoralization act, when men are torn up from their native seats by the irresistible magnet of commercial wealth, and congregated together in masses, resembling rather the armies of Timour and Napoleon than any thing else ever witnessed in the transactions of men. [Footnote 10: _Statistique de la France, publiée par le Gouvernement_, viii. 371-4. A most splendid work.] [Footnote 11: Fever patients, Glasgow, 1836, 37. Fever patients. Died. 1836, . . 10,092 . 1187 1837, . . 21,800 . 2180 ------ ---- 31,892 3367 --COWAN'S _Vital Statistics of Glasgow_, 1388, p 8, the work of a most able and meritorious medical gentleman now no more.] [Footnote 12: Dr Alison on the Epidemic of 1843, p. 67.] [Footnote 13: Captain Millar's Report, 1841, p. 8.]