There is certain degree of truth in these observations; but they are much exaggerated, and it is not in these causes that the principal sources of the profligacy of the manufacturing districts is to be found. The real cause of the demoralization of manufacturing towns is to be found, not in the nature of the employment which the people there receive, so much as in the manner in which they are brought together, the unhappy prevalence of general strikes, and the prodigious multitudes who are cast down by the ordinary vicissitudes of life, or the profligacy of their parents, into a situation of want, wretchedness, and despair. Consider how, during the last half century, the people have been brought together in the great manufacturing districts of England and Scotland. So rapid has been the progress of manufacturing industry during that period, that it has altogether out-stripped the powers of population in the districts where it was going forward, and occasioned a prodigious influx of persons from different and distant quarters, who have migrated from their paternal homes, and settled in the manufacturing districts, never to return.[5] Authentic evidence proves, that not less than _two millions_ of persons have, in this way, been transferred to the manufacturing counties of the north of England within the last forty years, chiefly from the agricultural counties of the south of that kingdom, or from Ireland. Not less than three hundred and fifty thousand persons have, during the same period, migrated into the two manufacturing counties of Lanark and Renfrew alone, in Scotland, chiefly from the Scotch Highlands, or north of Ireland. No such astonishing migration of the human species in so short a time, and to settle on so small a space, is on record in the whole annals of the world. It is unnecessary to say that the increase is to be ascribed chiefly, if not entirely, to immigration; for it is well known that such is the unhealthiness of manufacturing towns, especially to young children, that, so far from being able to add to their numbers, they are hardly ever able, without extraneous addition, to maintain them. [Footnote 5: Table showing the Population in 1801, 1891, and 1841, in the under-mentioned counties of Great Britain. Increase in 1801 1821 1841 forty years. Lancashire, 672,731 1,052,859 1,667,054 994,323 Yorkshire, W.R., 565,282 801,274 1,154,101 588,819 Staffordshire, 233,153 343,895 510,504 277,351 Nottingham, 140,350 186,873 249,910 109,560 Warwick, 208,190 274,322 401,715 193,155 Gloucester, 250,809 335,843 431,383 180,574 2,070,515 2,995,066 4,412,667 2,343,782