text:  Yet this period of anxious solicitude awakened fear and general effort to stem by all the known methods the deluge of profligacy and depravity with which the country has been flooded has been characterized by an increase of crime and a general loosening of morals among the labouring classes hitherto unprecedented in the country--certainly not equaled during the same period in any other European state and so far as we know without an example in the previous history of mankind