Chapter 5

15.Considering that there appears to be no objection in principle to the method of raising a loan by Tontine, and that the scheme is a popular one, it seems highly desirable that we should continue this means of measuring with positive exactness the results of our advancing civilization.

16.According to Mr Rickman, from the best information that can be obtained from Doomsday Book, the population of England in the time of William the Conqueror was 1½ millions.In the reign of Edward the Third (1377), when a poll-tax was imposed on all persons of both sexes above fourteen, it was 2½ millions.In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at the period of the Spanish Armada, it was 4 millions.According to Mr Finlaison, at the close of the 16th century it was somewhat under 5 millions two hundred thousand.According to Mr Rickman, on a computation founded on the return of Baptisms, as stated in the Abstract of Parish Registers, it was in 1700, 5½ millions; in 1750, 6½ millions; and in 1770, 7½ millions.The first actual enumeration was made in 1801. The following table exhibits the rate of increase in the population of Great Britain from that time up to the enumeration in 1851:Years.Population.IncreaseEach DecennialPeriod.Annual Rateof Increaseper cent.180110,917,433181112,424,1201,506,6871.274182114,402,6431,978,5231.489183116,564,1382,161,4951.408184118,813,7862,249,6481.279185121,121,9672,308,1811.186

16.According to Mr Rickman, from the best information that can be obtained from Doomsday Book, the population of England in the time of William the Conqueror was 1½ millions.

In the reign of Edward the Third (1377), when a poll-tax was imposed on all persons of both sexes above fourteen, it was 2½ millions.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at the period of the Spanish Armada, it was 4 millions.

According to Mr Finlaison, at the close of the 16th century it was somewhat under 5 millions two hundred thousand.

According to Mr Rickman, on a computation founded on the return of Baptisms, as stated in the Abstract of Parish Registers, it was in 1700, 5½ millions; in 1750, 6½ millions; and in 1770, 7½ millions.

The first actual enumeration was made in 1801. The following table exhibits the rate of increase in the population of Great Britain from that time up to the enumeration in 1851:

This increased production of food consists chiefly of grain, green crops, and garden vegetables, countless in variety, and highly nutritious and grateful, completely reversing the nature of the national subsistence compared with that of former times, and giving to the masses of the people a constant and unfailing supply, winter and summer, of fresh vegetable nutriment.

This increased production of food is mainly of home growth, for the supply of wheat from foreign sources would scarcely suffice to afford to each person two gallons of flour annually.

This increased production has been obtained partly by a progressive increase in the quantity of land brought under cultivation, which now amounts for the United Kingdom to upwards of 40,000,000 of acres, by far the greater part of which is employed in the production of human food; and partly by the employment of capital in the improvement of the soil, by which large tracts that afew years ago were wholly sterile, or deemed incapable of producing wheat, now yield some of the finest grain in England.[17]

17.“In 1821 almost the only grain produced in the Fens of Cambridgeshire consisted of oats; since then, by draining and manuring, the capability of the soil has been so changed that these fens now produce some of the finest wheat that is grown in England; and this more costly grain now constitutes the main dependence of the farmers in a district where 14 years ago its produce was scarcely attempted.”—Porter’s Progress of the Nation.

This increased fertility of the soil renders it more healthy by diminishing its moisture and raising its temperature. One cubic foot of water in the process of evaporation deprives three millions of cubic feet of air of one degree of temperature. An undrained field growing rushes has a permanent temperature from four to six degrees lower than an adjoining field drained and growing wheat. By draining and manuring, by throwing down fences, by removing trees, by clearing underwood, and by promoting the free aëration of the soil, the temperature of large tracts of land in the north of England has been permanently raised three degrees. Thus that very culture of the earth, by which it is made to yield the largest amount of food, increases its salubrity as an abode for man, and lessens at their source the main causes of epidemics.

This increased production has been obtained by a proportionally small addition to labour; for while the quantity of land brought under cultivation, and its produce, have been increasing at a rate of which there is no similar example in any age or country, the relative number of persons employed in agriculture has been as steadily decreasing. As long as the labour of a man applied to the cultivation of the soil is capable of producing only a bare subsistence for himself, there can be no advance in civilization. But when two men can produce subsistence for three, the labour of the third can be set free for the productionof surplus articles, which add to the sum of the general convenience, and from that moment the community takes a start in the career of improvement. From a comparison of occupations taken in 1831, it appears that, at that time, the division of labour among the people was such that one person raised nearly all the food of home production consumed by four persons.[18]

18.Porter’s Progress of the Nation, Chap. III.

Were the remaining three idle? Mediately or immediately they were engaged in producing clothing, or fuel, or machinery, economizing the production of both; and busily and well they worked.

In number they exceed one million and a half. Taking into account the accessory occupations, indeed, no fewer than one million two hundred thousand are employed on one single material alone, namely cotton. For these workers, at the beginning of the century, there were imported yearly 56 millions of pounds of cotton: at present the annual importation of it exceeds 550 millions of pounds. These workers in 1820 were assisted in their operations by fourteen thousand power-looms; at present they are assisted by three hundred thousand power-looms, besides twenty-five millions of spindles;[19]while each power-loom, superintended by an adult assisted by a child, completes weekly twenty times the amount of work which the hand-loom is capable of producing. The increase of production is of course enormous, and the effect is a progressive cheapening of the articles manufactured, reducing the price of some of them tenfold, and placing them within the reach of the poorest classes:[20]articles of clothing not only conducive to health through warmth, but almostequally so through cleanliness; for they are almost all composed of such tissues and textures as favour and compel frequent washing.

19.Return to the House of Commons by the Factory Inspectors, of the Number of Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax, and Silk Factories subject to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom, page 21.

20.The cheapness of some of these ornamental as well as useful fabrics is calculated to excite astonishment. A yard of platt net is worth from 20s. to £5; a yard of plain net may be bought for one shilling.

Gigantic strides have been made at the same time in another article of clothing, the basis of which is wool, and of which there were imported in 1801 seven millions of pounds; in 1844, sixty-three millions of pounds. This enormous importation of foreign wool has not only not diminished its home growth, but the increased demand for it has led to a vast multiplication of the animals that yield it, and what is of equal importance, has induced an extraordinary care in improving their breed; so that the very means which have fed the steam-engine have fed the people both with more plentiful and with better food; the steam-engine, meanwhile, applied to these and to all manufacturing processes, being as much a producer of food as the plough.[21]

21.Similar progress has been made in the manufacture of flax and silk as of cotton and wool.

And the same is emphatically true of fuel, the main creator of all this activity and of its astonishing results; this necessary of life being now brought to the door of every family in three-fold abundance and at one-half the price at which it could have been obtained at the commencement of the century; while such is the demand for it in various manufactures of vast magnitude, that one trade alone, that of iron, consumes annually eight millions of tons—a trade which immediately and powerfully facilitates the production both of food and of clothing. Thus, like one of Nature’s beautiful adaptations, like that wonderful cycle, for example, in which production, change, and reproduction go on in an unvarying circle, the constant and abundant supply of one main necessary of life furnishesthe means of producing the others; while these last are the immediate causes of the abundance of the first.

And what a busy hive does this country present at the present time! Out of every thousand males twenty years of age in the kingdom, 836 are directly employed in some active occupation contributing to the national wealth; while the remaining 114 are by no means idle, for they are engaged in some one of the professions.

Though the masses have not yet obtained their due share of the wealth they create, and though there is a class which in relation to one essential condition, to be stated immediately, civilization has scarcely reached, or reached only to injure—with these exceptions, no doubt very important ones—the evidence is indubitable that the entire body of society, from its base to its apex, stands on an elevated table-land which many centuries have been employed in raising and consolidating. I have partly proved this by showing the general diffusion of the means of healthful subsistence and the prolongation of life. I am now to prove it by applying these facts to the subject more especially before us, the decline and disappearance of epidemics.

It is now exactly two centuries, short of ten years, since the visitation of the Great Plague of 1665—that terrible disease which ravaged England for the space of 1249 years: for it is first heard of in English history in the year 430, and the last year in which its name appears in the Bills of Mortality is 1679; that terrible disease which not only maintained undiminished power over this vast space of time, but which sometimes recurred twenty times in one century—that terrible disease is gone. It cannot be supposed that it has worn itself out, for it still frequently returns with its ancient malignity to Constantinople, Alexandria, Smyrna, and other Eastern States.

Petechial or Jail fever, the fatal scourge of the ship,the prison, the hospital, the school, and in short of every place in which any considerable number of persons was assembled, and which when it once broke out was as destructive as the plague—that terrible disease is gone.

Intermittent fever, which in the middle of the fifteenth century and long afterwards recurred like the plague periodically but more frequently, and which often raged as universally, which was sometimes so mortal that the living could hardly bury the dead, and which spared not even the throne, for James I. and Oliver Cromwell both died of ague contracted in London—that formidable disease is gone. Ague, it is true, still exists in the fenny and marshy places which yet remain in England, and we occasionally see a case contracted there in the wards of the London Fever Hospital, but I have not seen a single case of ague contracted in London for upwards of a quarter of a century.

Remittent fever is also gone, scurvy is gone, rickets is gone, malignant sore throat is gone, typhus-gravior is gone, and if small-pox is not gone it is entirely the consequence of our own apathy and folly.

No less remarkable is the gradual decline and the ultimate cessation of certain forms of bowel-complaint of a very painful nature, the very names of which have long disappeared both from medical and popular language. In the 17th century the deaths from two of these diseases alone registered in the Bills of Mortality under two separate titles, were never less than 1000 annually, and in some years they exceeded 4000; but from having been 1070 in the year 1700, they decreased through each successive decade of that century in the following remarkable progression: 770, 706, 350, 150, 110, 80, 70, 40, 20; and they have so entirely disappeared during the 19th century, that, as I have just said, their very names are no longer in use.

Moreover several acute diseases which hardly come under the name of Epidemics, such as Rheumatic Fever, Pneumonia, and Peripneumonia, are much less frequent and fatal now than they were a century ago.

All this time there has been a continually decreasing mortality. In 1700 the estimated mortality of England and Wales was 1 in 39; in 1750 it was 1 in 40; in 1801 it was 1 in 44; in 1810 it was 1 in 49; in 1820 it was 1 in 55, and in 1830 it was 1 in 58.

In London in 1700[22]the deaths were 1 in 25; in 1750, 1 in 21;[23]in 1801, 1 in 35; in 1810, 1 in 38; and in 1830, 1 in 45.

22.parliamentary Returns, 1811.

23.It is conceived that the remarkable increase of the mortality in the middle of this century was mainly caused by the abuse of spirituous liquors, which was checked about that time by the imposition of high duties.—Sir Gilbert Blane’s Dissertations.

The diminishing number of those who are born merely to die exhibits the decrease of mortality in a still more striking point of view. The estimated mortality of persons under twenty years of age in London in 1780 was 1 in 76; in 1801 it was 1 in 96; in 1830 it was 1 in 124; in 1833 it was 1 in 137; not much more than one-half the proportion who died under twenty half a century ago.

The contrast between the mortality of former times and of the present is seen in the mortality of London in 1685 and in 1830. In the first period the deaths were 1 in 23; in the second they were 1 in 45, little more than one-half. Truly therefore has it been said, that the salubrity of London in the nineteenth century and of London in the seventeenth is far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary season and London in the cholera.

But still we have had Cholera. In less than a quarter of a century we have had three visitations of this dreadful disease, which exhibits the essential characters of a pestilenceof the middle ages; and if Typhus-gravior has disappeared, Typhus and its kindred diseases have taken its place; and the Registrar-General constantly presents before our eyes a faithful record of their ravages.

This is too true. We still have epidemics—and why? Because in all our towns there are large portions of the people who live in a state essentially the same as that which existed in the middle ages. The conditions are similar; the results are similar.

It is this unhappy class of people that form the exception to the general progress of the nation to which I have adverted.

These wretched places and their inhabitants do not obtrude themselves on the public eye. They are not seen in our common thoroughfares, nor in our splendid streets and squares. They are not known. The medical man knows them, the minister of religion knows them, the relieving officer knows them, a few dispensers of voluntary charity know them. They are not known to any one else.

Let me then describe one.

It is a small room, say twelve feet square; an inner room; no chimney, no window that will open, no inlet for fresh air, no outlet for foul air. There, on a miserable bed, lies a woman ill of typhus fever; a child at her side on the same bed is dying of that fever; a child already dead of it is stretched out on a table at the bed-side.

I could not breathe the air of that room. I could not remain in it long enough to write a prescription for the poor patients. As I was writing it at the street-door I shivered and felt sick. I knew that I had taken fever. I passed through a very severe form of it. I could take you to hundreds of such houses in every part of London; to hundreds of courts and lanes wholly consisting of such houses.

In such houses, with the conditions of the 15th and 16thcenturies, Cholera, in the middle of the 19th, found and exerted a power similar to that which characterized the epidemics of the middle ages, and here Typhus and its kindred diseases continually hold their undisputed reign: houses whose unhealthfulness is increased by the only marks of the age which attach to them, their brick construction and their glass windows; those bricks and windows more effectually than the ancient wattles excluding the external, and confining the internal air, and thereby fostering the generation and spread of typhus. It is remarked by Dr Macculloch, in his account of the Hebrides, that while the inhabitants had no shelter but huts of the most simple construction which afforded free ingress and egress to the air, they were not subject to fevers, but when such habitations were provided as seemed more comfortable and commodious, but which afforded recesses for stagnating air and impurities, then febrile infection was generated. Houses in this state, without ventilation, without the means of cleanliness, worse than the huts of the savage, exist in great numbers in all our towns, and too truly merit the name they have acquired of “fever nests.”

I once took a distinguished statistician of France to some of these places in London, and showed him the sick with typhus lying in their wretched beds; for the sick with typhus may be seen there every day of every year. After the painful inspection he exclaimed—“England is indeed adorned with a splendid mantle, but under it are concealed the greatest horrors.”

Determined that this eminent person should see both sides of the picture, I next took him to the Model Dwellings.

What are the Model Dwellings? Small plots of civilization cultivated in the midst of a wide waste of barbarism.

In what does their civilization consist? In very simple matters.

The subsoil drainage of the site of the building;

The free admission of light and air to each inhabited room;

The abolition of the cess-pool, involving complete house drainage, an abundant supply of water, and the immediate removal by it of all refuse which it is capable of holding in suspension;

Means for the removal of house refuse not capable of suspension in water.

And this is all. And what are the results of these few and simple arrangements?

That the mortality among the inhabitants of these dwellings is less than that of London generally, and far less than that of some of the filthy and neglected localities in London, the Potteries of Kensington for example; while the mortality among children under ten years of age, on an average of three years, is one-half less than that of the nation generally, and four times less than that of the Potteries;

That there has not been a single death from typhus, or any other form of continued fever, among the adults in any of these buildings since their establishment; and that during the two first visitations of epidemic cholera, with the exception of two cases which occurred under peculiar circumstances, there was no attack of cholera in any of these buildings, while from four to six deaths from the pestilence occurred in single houses in the immediate neighbourhood.

Such are the results of the first imperfect attempt at improvement; which, remarkable as they are, are not more striking than the results of neglect. Of the children born in the best part of a town one fifth die before they attain the fifth year of age; of the children born in the worst, one-half die before they attain their fifth year. The inhabitants of the worst localities attain little more than one half of the age of those who live in the best. Of 100,000children born in Surrey, 75,423 attain the age of ten years; 52,000 live to the age of fifty; and 28,878 live to seventy. In Liverpool, out of 100,000 persons born, only 48,211 live ten years; 25,878 live fifty years; and 8373 live seventy years. The probable duration of life in Surrey is 53 years; in Liverpool it is 26 years. Were the whole of the metropolis as healthy as the Model Dwellings, there would be an annual saving in London of nearly 20,000 lives. But these lives are not saved; this number of persons is allowed to perish every year, and they are as truly and as needlessly sacrificed as if they were taken out on Bethnal-green and shot.

When we bear in mind the suffering which in every case accompanies this waste of life, and the suffering which must inevitably follow it, and remember that it is admitted that these dreadful evils are remediable and preventible, it is difficult to suppress the natural feelings of indignation and of sorrow, that in a country calling itself Christian the application of the known remedies should be so long delayed.

It is right however to acknowledge that something has been done, and is in progress, for the improvement of the sanitary condition of the people. The principle is admitted that it is the duty of the Legislature to deal with this matter, and the first systematic legislative effort to bring about a better state of things has been made.

The Public Health Act is in operation, and the general and proper application by local authorities of the powers it confers would place every part of every town in Great Britain in as good a sanitary condition, at least, as that of the Model Dwellings.

Up to the present time (1855) there are under this Act 196 towns, containing a population of upwards of 2¼ millions. In about 50 of these towns, however, nothing has yet been done.

Eleven towns, with a population of about half a million, have adopted the powers of the Act in subsequent local acts.

Works of drainage and water supply are completed, or are in an advanced state, in 70 towns.

Mortgages have been sanctioned—

Making a total of nearly two millions sterling devoted to sanitary improvement.[24]

24.This has been since greatly increased: see Appendix, p. 129. [Ed.]

It is difficult at present to give the average cost of these combined and complete sanitary works; but the total expense for public and private works of drainage and water supply for houses of from £10 to £20 per annual rental, may be taken at 4d. per week per house.

The great obstacle to sanitary progress is the fear of rates, not so much on the part of the poor, who gladly pay for the improvements, but on the part of the owners of small tenements, by whom chiefly opposition is raised to the application of this Act.

In the town of Alnwick, public and private works of sewerage and drainage have been completed. There have been laid down about twenty miles of sewers and drains, and seventeen miles of apparatus for water supply, at a total cost, for the combined works, of 4d. per week per house for the term of thirty years; after the expiration of which period the cost of the works, both principal and interest, will have become liquidated, and the only expense thereafter will be for maintenance.

On inspecting these works, I saw in the tenements occupied by the lowest classes a high degree of cleanliness, wholesomeness, and comfort, and heard from the inhabitants an expression of the greatest satisfaction.

We have as yet no certain knowledge of the extent to which such works are capable of preventing sickness and lengthening life. But the most perfect drainage, combined with the most ample supply of water, will not alone secure for the public health all which it is practicable to accomplish. There must also be provision for the better construction of the houses of the poor; for the prevention of overcrowding; for street ventilation and cleansing, and for the exclusion from the neighbourhood of human dwellings of filth-creating animals and of noxious trades. When all this is done, as it might be done, and as it would be done were there a general perception of the crying evils it would remedy, Epidemics would disappear, the more formidable of them immediately, and all of them, I believe, in the end.

From the whole of these facts and observations we see—

1. That Epidemics are under our own control; we may promote their spread; we may prevent it. We may secure ourselves from them. We have done so. We have banished the most formidable. Those that remain are not so difficult to be conquered as those that have been vanquished. The causes of Typhus are more completely under our control than those of Intermittent. We have banished Intermittent. We may put an end to Typhus. We have actually done so. We have encompassed the Model Dwellings by a barrier which neither typhus, nor even cholera, nor any of the other causes of excessive sickness and premature mortality have been able to pass. To the residents within that barrier the chance of life has been almost doubled; to their children it has been doubled;and compared with some other children of their own class it has been increased fourfold.

2. We see that Epidemics are not made by a Divine law the necessary condition of man’s existence upon earth. The boon of life is not marred with this penalty. The great laws of nature, which are God’s ordinances in their regular course and appointed operation, do form and give off around us, products which are injurious to us; but He has given us senses to perceive them, and reason to devise the means of avoiding them, and epidemics arise and spread because we will not regard the one, nor use the other.

3. We see that there are circumstances which render it doubtful whether civilization has yet attained a point that places it beyond the danger of retrogression. States in some respects of higher civilization than our own have relapsed into barbarism. There is indeed one circumstance which may give us hope; there is one humanizing principle which is now at least recognized and in partial operation, of which there is no trace in any nation of antiquity. I mean the principle of kindness as a governing influence, distinguished from the principle of brute force.

That the whole human race is one family, that the people of every colour, clime, language, government, and faith, are one brotherhood, and that the same law of love which is the bond of the union, strength, and happiness of a single family, is equally binding on the universal family of mankind, are the fundamental and distinguishing principles of our religion; and in proportion to our conformity in our private and public life to the spirit of these divine principles, advancement in civilization is certain; relapse into barbarism is impossible. But as yet there is no such conformity. We neglect the education of the people, quarrelling about the mode, and postponing the thing. We devote to a life of absorbing labour the child and the youth ungrounded in the elements of knowledge, untrainedto habits of self-restraint, thereby dooming the man to the blankness and turbulence of ignorance and intemperance. We equally neglect the sanitary condition of the people. We make no provision for securing to the humblest classes, and they can make none for themselves, the conditions that are essential to their physical health, the loss of which to them involves and includes every other. We thus neglect body and mind, and then the disorders and vices which necessarily follow we endeavour to repress by punishments that harden but never reform, neither trusting nor trying the influence of gentleness, which our religion teaches us is stronger than ignorance, stronger than crime, and can master both. It is this state of things that places in danger the ark of civilization.

Lastly, we see the first step that must be taken to elevate the people: nay, even to bring them within the pale of the civilization already attained. We must improve their sanitary condition. Until this is done, no civilizing influence can touch them. The schoolmaster will labour in vain; the minister of religion will labour in vain; neither can make any progress in the fulfilment of their mission in a den of filth. Moral purity is incompatible with bodily impurity. Moral degradation is indissolubly united with physical squalor. The depression and discomfort of the hovel produce and foster obtuseness of mind, hardness of heart, selfish and sensual indulgence, violence, and crime. It is the Home that makes the man; it is the home that educates the family. It is the distinction and the curse of Barbarism that it is without a home: it is the distinction and the blessing of Civilization that it prepares a home in which Christianity may abide, and guide, and govern.

[The foregoing is from the Edinburgh Lectures. See Introduction.Ed.]

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