In 1801 the population was 1,599,068, and since that time it has increased eighty per cent., whereas the consumption of spirits has grown almost six hundred per cent.! The poor people who are expelled from the land cannot be sold. The hammer of the auctioneer cannot be allowed to separate parents from children, or husbands from wives, but poverty, drunkenness, and prostitution produce a similar effect, and in a form even more deplorable. In the five years preceding 1840, every fifth person in Glasgow had been attacked by fever, and the deaths therefrom amounted to almost five thousand. It is impossible to study the condition of this portion of the United Kingdom without arriving at the conclusion that society is rapidly being divided into the very rich and the very poor, and that the latter are steadily declining in their power of self-government, and becoming more and more slaves to the former. Centralization tends here, as everywhere, to absenteeism, and "absenteeism," says Dr. Forbes of Glasgow [126] -- "Is in its results everywhere the same. All the transactions and communications between the richer and the poorer classes, have thus substituted for them the sternness of official agency, in the room of that kind and generous treatment which, let them meet unrestrained, the more prosperous children of the same parent would in almost every case pay to their less fortunate brothers. * * * Where the power of sympathy has been altogether or nearly abolished among the different ranks of society, one of the first effects appears in a yawning and ever-widening gulf of poverty which gathers round its foundations. As the lofty shore indicates the depth of the surrounding ocean, the proud pinnacles of wealth in society are the indices of a corresponding depression among the humbler ranks. The greatest misery of man is ever the adjunct of his proudest splendour." Such are the results everywhere of that system which looks to converting England into a great workshop and confining the people of all other nations to the labours of the field. In Jamaica, it annihilated three-fifths of all the negroes imported, and it is now rapidly driving the remainder into barbarism and ultimately to annihilation. In the Southern States, it causes the export of men, women, and children, and the breaking up of families. In India, it has caused famines and pestilences, and is now establishing the slave trade in a new form. In Ireland, it has in half a century carried the people back to a condition worthy only of the darkest part of the Middle Ages, and is now extirpating them from the land of their fathers. In Scotland, it is rapidly dividing the population into two parts--the master on one hand, and the slave on the other. How it has operated, and is now operating, in England itself, we may how examine. CHAPTER XIV. HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN ENGLAND.