CHAP, xxvi REOCCUPATION OF THE LAND 479 



the statistics of crime for thirty years an equally large 

 increase in the prison population and in crime itself. 1 



As confirming and illustrating all these terrible facts, 

 we find, in the annual reports of the Registrar-General, 

 proof that for the last forty years there has been a 

 continuous increase in the proportion of deaths 

 occurring in workhouses, hospitals, asylums, and other 

 public charitable institutions, from 16 per cent, of the 

 total deaths (in London) in the five years 1856-60, to 26*9 

 per cent, in the years 1892-96 ; while a similar increase, 

 though not quite so great, is shown for the whole of 

 England. 



Coincident with all these facts, and to some extent 

 explaining them, is the continuous depopulation of the 

 rural districts and increase of town and city populations, 

 certainly largely due, and I believe wholly due, to the 

 monopoly of the land in the hands of a limited class, which 

 has always forbidden, and still forbids to the workers, the 

 free use of their native soil except in a very small number 

 of cases, and usually on exorbitant terms. Hence has 

 arisen the phenomenon of an ever-increasing lack of per- 

 manent employment ; the flocking of large numbers of 

 rural labourers to the towns ; the increase of want, suicide, 

 insanity, and crime ; millions of acres of land going out of 

 cultivation; and the cry of agricultural depression, now 

 raised the more loudly because the pockets of the land- 

 lords themselves are affected by it. 



Most of the aspects of the "problem of poverty" above 

 adverted to, I have dealt with more or less fully else- 

 where, and also to some extent in the chapters of this 

 volume on the Land Question, the Social Quagmire, &c. 

 My present object is to suggest an immediate practical 

 remedy for some of the worst features of the present state 

 of things, by withdrawing from the labour market the 

 superabundant workers and rendering them wholly self- 

 supporting on the land. This once effected, every other 

 worker in the kingdom will be benefited, and the move- 

 ment for a greatly improved organisation of society will be 



1 See "Increase of Crime," by Rev. W. D. Morrison, in the 

 Nineteenth Century of June, 1892. 



