A necessary consequence of this demoralization is that infanticide prevails to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world. The London _Leader_ informs its readers that upon a recent occasion--
"It was declared by the coroner of Leeds, and assented to as probable by the surgeon, that there were, as near as could be calculated, about three hundred children put to death yearly in Leeds alone that were not registered by the law. In other words, three hundred infants were murdered to avoid the consequences of their living, and these murders, as the coroner said, are never detected."
The reader may now advantageously turn to the account of the state of education in Leeds, already given,[136] with a view to ascertain the intellectual condition of the women guilty of the foul and unnatural crime of child-murder. Doing so, he will find that out of eighteen hundred and fifty that were married there were _one thousand and twenty who could not sign their names_--and this in the centre of civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century!
But a short time since, the _Morning Chronicle_ gave its readers a list of twenty-two trials, for child-murder alone, that had been _reported_ in its columns, and these were stated to be but one-half of those that had taken place in the short period of twenty-seven days! On the same occasion it stated that although English ruffianism had "not taken to the knife," it had
"Advanced in the devilish accomplishment of biting off noses and scooping out eyes. Kicking a man to death while he is down," it continued, "or treating, a wife in the same way--stamping on an enemy or a paramour with hobnailed boots--smashing a woman's head with a hand-iron--these atrocities, which are of almost daily occurrence in our cities, are not so much imputed crimes as they are the extravagant exaggerations of the coarse, brutal, sullen temper of an Englishman, brutified by ignorance and stupefied by drink."
On the same occasion the _Chronicle_ stated that in villages few young people of the present day marry until, as the phrase is, it has "become necessary." It is, it continued, the rural practice to "keep company in a very loose sense, till a cradle is as necessary as a ring." On another, and quite recent occasion, the same journal furnished its readers with the following striking illustration of the state of morals:--