Whether the lot of the landless and the less talented had improved since the day of Jackson would be hard to determine. If it was easier to purchase land, or if there was an actual increase in wages, the number of the poorer class of Americans had increased both actually and relatively, and thus competition operated to prevent improved housing and a better country life. Still the life of the great majority in the United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and economic scale was distinctly better. That is what made America the Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling. Georgia had a population of 43,684 white illiterates, to say nothing of the 500,000 blacks; Massachusetts had 46,262; Indiana, 60,943; Pennsylvania, 72,156, and North Carolina, 68,128. There were 101 persons in the jails of Georgia on June 1, 1860; Virginia had 189; Massachusetts, 1161, and Illinois, 485. In the open life of the South and West, where men could easily get to the land, there was little crime and jails were often empty; in the industrial belt the prisons were always occupied. In like manner and for the same reasons Southern and Western hospitals for the insane and homes for the poor often showed very small percentages of these unfortunates. Perhaps the unrelieved poverty of the industrial workers and the stress of uncertainty in the matter of employment made the differences. Certainly the weight of the old English common law system, adopted in all the States, bore hardly on the dependent classes of the East; and the courts were not loath to send undefended men to prison. In the South the worker was punished by his master on the plantation for all the minor offenses, and it was only free negroes and the poorer whites who were the subjects of the ordinary social discipline and punishment.