sort of fate by the poor wretches themselves,
and vestrymen and landlords make long speeches
about the improvident and ill-conditioned lives
of the poor. If a medical officer be offensively
punctilious as to what he considers his duty, if
he be persuaded that human life is of more
consequence than the prejudices or petty interests
of guardians, and if he report accordingly, he
soon finds himself a marked man. His opinions
are laughed at, and his suggestions ignored, while
the vestry protests, like the fat landlord we met
in Cummin-street, against being asked to protect
such mischievous and degraded people as those
with whom they have unhappily to deal.

If the component parts of a metropolitan
vestry be considered, and the position, education,
and intelligence of its members be weighed, it
becomes grotesquely horrible that an irresponsible
power over life and death should be vested
in such hands. Let not the opulent or well-born
content themselves with giving this matter the
languid attention we too commonly vouchsafe
to other people's concerns. The fever poison
is spreading far and wide, and its victims
multiply year by year. In Saint Dragon's alone
its rate of progress has been as follows: In
1861 there were twenty-five fever deaths; in
1862, forty-eight; in 1863, eighty-eight; in
1864, one hundred and thirteen; in 1865, one
hundred and twenty-eight. Every one of these
deaths represents on an average eight cases of
fever, or about three thousand four hundred in
one parish; and though they occurred almost
wholly among the poorest, it is impossible to fix
a limit to the contagion they diffuse. From
these fever-stricken houses, charwomen, slop-
workers, porters, street stall-keepers, and
thousands of humble workers, who live by
ministering to the wants of the rich, come forth daily,
charged with the fatal errand of visiting upon
society the consequences of its most sinful supineness
and its most shameful neglect. Read, father
or mother, this extract from the Report of the
Council of Public Health of the Citizen
Associates of New York for 1865, and then, looking at
the children smiling at your knees, ask how long
they are to be exposed to dangers which could be
easily obviated, and which are due to the dense
ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the people in
whose hands you are content to leave your own
fate, and the fate of those dearer to you than life:

"A young man, residing with his parents,
in Thirty-second-street, contracted typhus at
the bedside of a sick friend in another block;
his father in turn contracted the same fever
from the son, and died; three other cases
followed in the same family. From this family
the poison spread to visitors from a family in
another block, in which family six cases occurred
in succession, and two died. During this time
the fever was communicated to two other families
in the same house. In the mean time, some
of these people being alarmed at the spread and
fatality of the disease, removed to another block,
and carried the infection with them. The
inspector traced the same fever spreading through
families in Twenty-eighth-street, and was able
to trace its introduction from the fountain of
infection in Thirty-first-street. He found that
seventeen cases of typhus, in five families, and
in four distinct localities, resulted from the
careless exposure of the fever patients to
promiscuous visitors. And all this was but the
beginning of an evil the records of which are
still in progress."

There is no reasonable doubt that prompt
removal, isolation, and cleansing, would have
stayed this scourge at the first or second case;
any more than that continued neglect will cause
it to progress with fearful rapidity and at
compound interest. Saint Dragon's has
furnished a larger number of fever patients in a
given period than any other London parish
or union, but it is only a slightly exaggerated
specimen of many places of its class. If
the infected houses of this and other parishes
were scrubbed and limewashed from top to
bottom, and were afterwards kept empty for not
less than ten days, they would become safe
habitations; if the commonest rules of decency
were observed in their management, they need
not become infected at all. That the Lodging-
house Act is systematically evaded, and that
beds are let by the night in unlicensed houses;
that house refuse and dirt is not removed for
days, often for weeks, and sometimes for months:
the dustmen demanding money in addition to
the contractor's parish pay; that the parochial
inspection is partial, inefficient, and inoperative;
that only one-tenth of the quantity of water
essential to health is supplied to vast districts;
that out of seven thousand houses, four
thousand are farmed or sub-let, and require close
and authoritative supervision; that the result is
a chronic pestilence, which will blaze up into a
devastating plague as soon as an unwholesome
season sets in; these are surely facts which
justify a cry for reform. Local self-government
is a mighty pretty thing, and centralisation is
an ugly bugbear; but, inasmuch as you and I
and every Londoner who reads this page, are in
daily and increasing peril of being sacrificed to
the fine old conservatism of that obstinate block-
head the British vestryman, I should like to ask
if the country's constitution would be greatly
endangered by its protecting mine, or whether
it be beneath the dignity of parliament to check
the wholesale dissemination of poison, and the
recklessly indiscriminate dealing out of death?

LITTLE PEOPLE.

MEN of moderate height have one solace under
their disappointment. Although they are not
run after and admired for their great or small
stature, they are like giants and dwarfs in this,
that two of them sometimes make a moderate
pair. Add the ninety-three inches or so of
Chang Woo Gow the great, to the thirty-eight
inches of Chung Mow the small, and divide by
two, and you get two men of medium stature;
and so you do if you adopt the same plan with
people of any ordinary and familiar stature.