Life & Wisdom Quote by William Falconer

“The accumulation of numbers” sounds bloodless until you remember Falconer is writing in an 18th-century Britain where crowds are becoming a new force: swelling port cities, packed ships, booming trade, and the early churn of industrial urban life. He’s not talking about arithmetic. He’s talking about bodies gathered too tightly, and what polite society feared that proximity would produce.

Falconer’s intent is moral warning with a public-health alibi. The sentence stages a familiar Enlightenment maneuver: dress anxiety about vice in the language of observable consequences. “Moral corruptions” is the headline charge, but he quickly pivots to “health,” invoking the era’s growing belief that cities incubate disease as surely as they incubate temptation. The phrase “various vices incident thereto” does a lot of work: vice becomes not merely chosen but “incident” to density, as if sin is an environmental hazard like bad air or dirty water.

The subtext is classed and urban-phobic. Crowds mean the poor, the unruly, the sexually illicit, the tavern, the brothel, the pressgang, the dockside. “Well known” is a rhetorical power move: it closes debate by appealing to common sense and shared disgust, turning social prejudice into settled fact.

As a poet, Falconer isn’t offering policy; he’s offering atmosphere. The sentence makes population itself feel like a contaminant, a moral miasma. It captures the moment when modernity starts looking less like progress and more like a problem of scale: more people, more contact, more commerce, more risk - and, to Falconer’s eye, more rot.