"The singular and remarkable difference between the respective condition of the peasants and operatives of Germany and Switzerland, and those of England and Ireland, in this respect, is alone sufficient to prove the singular difference between their respective social condition. "The village inn in Germany is quite a different kind of place to the village inn in England. It is intended and used less for mere drinking, than, as a place for meeting and conversation; it is, so to speak, the villagers' club."--Vol. i. 232. Under such circumstances, we cannot be surprised when told by Mr. Alison that over the whole kingdom crime increases four times as fast as the population, and that "in Lancashire population doubles in thirty years, crime in five years and a half." How, indeed, could it be otherwise under a system based upon the idea of "keeping labour down"--one that tends to the consolidation of the land and the exclusion of men from the work of cultivation, and then excludes them from the factory, while forcing hundreds of thousands of indigent and almost starving Irish into England in search of employment? The process of "eviction" in Ireland has been already described. How the same work has been, and is being, performed in England is thus stated by the _Times_:-- "Our village peasantry are jostled about from cottage to cottage, or from cottage to no cottage at all, as freely and with as little regard to their personal tastes, and conveniences as if we were removing our pigs, cows, and horses from one sty or shed to another. If they cannot get a house over their heads they go to the Union, and are distributed--the man in one part, the wife in another, and the children again somewhere else. That is a settled thing. Our peasantry bear it, or, if they can't bear it, they die, and there is an end of it on this side of the grave; though how it will stand at the great audit, we leave an 'English Catholic' to imagine. We only mean to say that in England the work has been done; cotters have been exterminated; small holdings abolished; the process of eviction rendered superfluous; the landlord's word made law; the refuge of the discontented reduced to a workhouse, and all without a shot, or a bludgeon, or a missile being heard of." Thus driven from the land, they are forced to take refuge in London and Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, and accordingly there it is that we find nearly the whole increase of population in the last ten years. Out of less than two millions, more than 400,000 were added to the number of London alone, and those who are familiar with Mr. Mayhew's work, _London Labour and London Poor_, do not need to be told of the extraordinary wretchedness, nor of the immorality that there abound. Inquiries get on foot by Lord Ashley have shown that "in the midst of that city there are," says Mr. Kay--