text:  The blue folios of the Houses of Parliament teem with authentic and decisive evidence of the vast increase during the last thirty years of crime and frequent destitution among the working classes in all parts of the empire; every four or five years a brief feverish period of gambling extravagance and commercial prosperity is succeeded by a long and dreary season of anxiety distress and depression; frightful strikes among the workmen attended with boundless distress among and hideous democratic tyranny over them invariably succeed in the close of those periods of suffering as pestilence stalks in the rear of famine; and popular insurrection has become so common that it is a rare thing to see two years pass over without martial law being of necessity practically enforced in some part of the empire