individuals absolutely do die every year from
the want of such a sanitary police as the Public
Health Act, amended by some few additional
powers, would establish. What number of
persons are really sent out of the world from
preventible causes. It is also true that those
causes can be efficiently removed for about a
halfpenny per head a-week; or threepence per
week per house; or about eight times less than
those who die unnecessarily cost the public in
hospitals, poor's rates, and burial. In the
"Journal of Public Health" for November,
1848, and August, 1849, it is shown by
elaborate tables, that the direct cost of, and
estimated money loss through, typhus fever
alone in the metropolis, amounted during the
four years, 1843-1847, to one million three
hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds,
or two hundred and sixty-five thousand,
six hundred pounds annually. This sum
is exclusive of the amounts contributed for
the purchase and maintenance of fever
hospitals. For 1848, when the mortality
from typhus had increased to three thousand
five hundred and sixty-nine, the direct cost
and money loss was estimated at four hundred
and forty thousand pounds.

This cold-blooded way of putting the really
appalling state of the case is, alas! the only
successful mode of appealing to that hard-headed,
though sometimes soft-hearted, periphrasis,
John Bull, when he is under no special
exciting cause of dread. His heart is only
reached through his pocket, except when put
in a state of alarm. Cry " Cholera! " or any
other frightful conjuration, and he bestirs
himself. To cholera we owe the few sanitary
measures now in force; but which were
passed by the House—as a coward may seem
courageous—in its agonies of fright. The
moment, however, Cholera bulletins ceased to
be issued, John buttoned up his pockets
tighter than ever, and Parliament was dumb
regarding public health, except to undo one or
two good things it had done. The inflated
promises of the legislature collapsed into thin
air, on the very day the danger was withdrawn.
It was the legend over again of the nameless
gentleman who, when he was sick, swore he
would turn a monk; but when he got well
"the devil a monk was he." Ever since, sani-
tary legislation has been as much a dead letter
in the Metropolis, as if the deadly condition of
some of its districts had never been whispered
between the wind and the nobility of Westminster,
in Parliament assembled.

It has no effect upon unreasoning John Bull
to tell him that, on an average, cholera does
not devour a tithe of the victims which fever,
consumption, and other preventible diseases
make away with. Cholera comes upon him
like an ogre, eating its victims all at once,
and he quakes with terror; the daily, deadly
destruction of human beings by " every-day"
diseases, he takes no heed of. Take him,
however, a slate and pencil; count costs to
him; show that cholera costs so much; that
ordinary, contagious, but preventible diseases,
cost so much more; and that prevention is
so many hundred per cent, cheaper than the
cheapest cures, he begins to be amenable to
reason. Nothing but pocket arithmetic,
terror, or melo-dramatic appeals to his
soft-hearted sympathy, moves John Bull.

In order to supply the best of these exercitations
by the accumulation of carefully
sifted, and well authenticated facts, and
sound reasonings; the results of scientific
investigations, and of a large range of pa-
thological statistics, the Metropolitan Sanitary
Association has been for some months—
like another " Ole Joe "—knocking at the
door of Old John. Whether the heavy old
gentleman will soon open it to conviction and
improvement depends, we think, very much
upon the energy and liberality with which
that society is supported and seconded by the
public; for whose sole benefit it was called
into existence. To the exertions of many of its
leading members, if not to the collective body
itself, John Bull has responded, by admitting
into his premises the Extra-Mural Interment
Bill, and we think he is just now holding
his door a-jar to catch the Water Supply Bill,
which it is hoped he will admit, and pass
through That House next session. Meantime
we, in common with the association aforesaid,
beg his attention to a few other points of
improvement:—

The adage " as free as air," has become obsolete
by Act of Parliament. Neither air nor
light have been free since the imposition of
the window-tax. We are obliged to pay for
what nature supplies lavishly to all, at so
much per window per year; and the poor who
cannot afford the expense, are stinted in two of
the most urgent necessities of life. The effects
produced by a deprivation of them are not
immediate, and are therefore unheeded. When
a poor man or woman in a dark, close, smoky
house is laid up with scrofula, consumption,
water in the head, wasting, or a complication of
epidemic diseases, nobody thinks of attributing
the illness to the right cause;—which may be a
want of light and air. If he or she were struck
down by a flash of lightning, there would be
an immediate outcry against the authorities,
whoever they may be, for not providing
proper lightning conductors; but because
the poison—generated by the absence of
light and air—is not seen at work, the victim
dies unheeded, and the window tax, which
shuts out the remedies, is continued without
a murmur. In illustration of these facts, we
may quote a little information respecting the
tadpole, an humble animal, which—if the
author of " Vestiges of Creation " be any
authority and the theory of development be
more than a childish dream—was the progenitor
of man himself. The passage is from the report
of the half-fledged Health of Towns'
Commission:—

"If the young of some of the lower tribes
of creatures are supplied with their proper