obtain a separate house of any sort. They feel that if they defer
their marriage for ten or fifteen years, they will be at the end of
that period in just the same position as before, and no better off
for their waiting. Having then lost all hope of any improvement of
their social situation, and all sense of the indelicacy of taking a
wife home to the bedroom already occupied by parents, brothers, and
sisters, they marry early in life,--often, if not generally, before
the age of twenty,--and very often occupy, for the first part of
their married life, another bed in the already crowded sleeping-room
of their parents! In this way the morality of the peasants is
destroyed; the numbers of this degraded population are unnaturally
increased, and their means of subsistence are diminished by the
increasing competition of their increasing numbers."--Vol. i. 472.

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