“This table well deserves study. It shows that the proportional amount of crime to population calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in both years in almost all the _agricultural_ counties of England than it was in the _manufacturing_ and mining districts.… With what terrible significance do these statistics plead the cause of the poor of our rural districts! Notwithstanding that a town life necessarily presents so many more opportunities for, and temptations to, vice than a rural life; notwithstanding that the associations of the latter are naturally so much purer and so much more moral than those of the former; notwithstanding the wonderfully crowded state of the great manufacturing cities of Lancashire; notwithstanding the constant influx of Irish, sailors, vagrants, beggars, and starving natives of agricultural districts of England and Wales; and notwithstanding the miserable state of most of the primary schools of those districts and the great ignorance of the majority of the inhabitants, still, in the face of all these and other equally significant facts, the criminality of the _manufacturing_ districts of Lancashire is LESS in proportion to the population than that of most of the rural districts of England and Wales!”[13] In Scotland illegitimacy is more common in the country than in the towns and cities. In 1870 the rate of illegitimacy for the whole country was 9.4 per cent., or 1 in every 10.6; whereas in the rural districts alone it was 10.5, or 1 in every 9.5. In 1871 it was for the whole country 10.1, or 1 in every 9.8, and in the rural districts 11.2, or 1 in every 8.9.[14] In England also the rate of illegitimacy is much larger in the rural districts than in the cities, whereas in Catholic France it is just the reverse. In the country districts of England we have the following rate: Nottingham, 8.9 York, North Riding, 8.9 Salop, 9.8 Westmoreland, 9.7 Norfolk, 10.7 Cumberland, 11.4 In France: Rural districts, 4.2 La Vendée, 2.2 Brittany—Côte d’Or, 1.2 Thus in the most Catholic rural districts of France there are only one or two illegitimate births in every hundred.