Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Blake

Blake’s sentence reads like a Victorian progress report that can’t keep a straight face about “progress.” Wealth piles up, commerce expands, transport improves; each clause nods to modernity’s triumphs, then swivels to its shadow economy. The intent is unmistakably political: to argue that crime is not merely a moral failing of individuals but a byproduct of structural change, produced by the same engines Parliament is busy celebrating. He’s tightening the screws on complacent liberal optimism: you don’t get railways, trade, and booming cities without also getting new opportunities for fraud, theft, and mobility-assisted flight.

The subtext is a warning about incentives and uneven distribution. “Accumulation of personal wealth” doesn’t just mean more money; it implies more portable value, more targets, more temptation, and a sharper contrast between haves and have-nots. “Extension of commercial transactions” hints at impersonal exchange, credit, paperwork, distant partners - conditions ripe for deception and harder policing. Crime isn’t increasing because people have become worse; it’s increasing because society has become more complex, and complexity creates exploitable seams.

Context matters: late-19th-century Britain and Ireland were reorganized by rail, steamship travel, telegraphy, urbanization, and expanding consumer markets. Those same networks challenged local law enforcement built for slower, smaller communities. By foregrounding “transport” as an accomplice to fugitives, Blake anticipates a modern policy dilemma: every infrastructure upgrade is also a logistics upgrade for wrongdoing. He’s not condemning modernization so much as insisting the state adapt - coordinate across jurisdictions, professionalize policing, and rethink criminal justice for an economy that no longer sits still.