death rate—-in all parts high—-is actually
doubled. While in England the mean duration
of life, with men who have reached the
age of twenty, will be forty years, in the
City of London it will be but thirty, and in
the western divisions of it only twenty-eight.
He who starts upon a city life and residence
at the age of twenty, says the city officer of
health, " hardly stands a better chance of
existence than do the average of infants when
they are a year old; for in the one case he
only reaches to the age of forty-eight, and in
the other, with all the dangers of early life,
they will get to be forty-seven."

But these averages are struck between the
well-to-do and the ill-to-do; the great mortality
in courts and alleys is made to suggest
a diminution of life that does not really take
place in the mansions of the rich.

Well, but it does sometimes. Dr. Druitt
is the medical officer of health for Saint
George's, Hanover Square. Small-pox appeared
in his district. One of the places in
which it appeared, was the room of a journeyman
who—- in this room, surrounded by his
sick children—-was making coats for the
customers of a fashionable tailor in a fashionable
street. Another was the room of a
laundress, employed in getting up gentlemen's
white ties. Another was inhabited by
the family of an upper servant in a house in
Berkeley Square.

That is a broad hint to the selfish, but
God knows, we are not selfish as a people in
this matter. When we are told that at
Dulwich, where the high ground secures
light and air, where money secures all the
wants of life, and where the population is
but at the rate of one person in one acre,
there died last year only thirteen persons
in a thousand, two of them children, and
not one from a preventible disease; while in
Peckham—-to go no farther—-there died
twenty in a thousand, we do not fail to see
the influence of a man's dwelling-place on
the duration of his life. We are not blind
to the meaning of a comparison like this
between neighbour and neighbour. Between
Hanover Square and Hyde Park are the
hundred and thirty-seven houses of Lower
and Upper Brook Street, besides thirteen
mansions at the north of Grosvenor Square.
The deaths in them all between the first of
April last year and the same date this year
were nine. Shepherd's Court in Upper
Brook Street contains nine houses, and there
were as many deaths in those houses alone.
We give some more of these comparisons
which carry their own lesson with them too
distinctly, and appeal too surely to our
hearts, to need enforcement. In the west
Ward of Mile End, the deaths are at the rate
of thirty-two in every thousand; in the
centre ward, which is not much less densely
crowded, there die out of the thousand only
twenty-one. The Medical Officer of Health
for Mile End, Mr. Freeman, looks for the
cause of this excessive destruction of life
in his west ward, and finds that it takes
place in a new town, which has sprung up
during the last few years at the rear of Castle
Tavern, sometimes called the Rhodeswell
estate. These houses form a main part of
the ward; they have been inhabited several
years, yet the roads were not made up and
the district was undrained. Under recent
laws the drainage of a new street is made
before houses are built, instead of afterwards.

At Chelsea, Dr. Barclay, local Officer of
Health, prudently doubtful of conclusions
drawn from a comparison between populations
of only one, two, or three thousand for
a single year, yet sets down certain facts in
a table of the rate of mortality from epidemics
in different corners of the parish. In
the parish as a whole there do not die of
epidemic and infectious diseases so many as
two in a thousand, but in various districts
of small streets and courts, the deaths from
this cause amount to six or even a little more
than seven in a thousand. Now, this table
shows that among such courts the death rate
has been by far the lowest where the year's
course of sanitary improvement was begun
first, and even then has been made up almost
entirely of deaths in a street that was not
inspected until very late in the season, and
of some that occurred before any alterations
were begun. We need not hesitate to accept
the inference suggested. The effect of changes
made in Rotherhithe shows most emphatically,
if any men could doubt, how life is to
be saved by making homes less poisonous.
In eighteen hundred and forty-nine, cholera
mowed down the inhabitants of the eastern
part of Rotherhithe, which was without
sewers, almost without drains, and without
other water than the people dipped up from
the Thames or from some filthy tidal wells.
The ravages of cholera caused the construction
of a sewer and the bringing-in of an
abundant supply of good water. When the
cholera returned in eighteen hundred and
fifty-four, there was no part of London south
of the Thames more free from it than the
eastern part of Rotherhithe: while the new
streets on the Deptford Lower Road, built
upon undrained garden ground, suffered
severely. Again, writes Mr. Murdoch, Medical
Officer of Health for Rotherhithe, a
few years ago the upper part of Swan Lane
was intersected by foul open ditches. Typhus
fever then reigned constantly on that spot.
As many as ninety cases of fever were
attended by the parish surgeon in twelve
months. But, since the ditches have been
arched over, the disease has entirely
disappeared, and the place is one of the
healthiest in the parish.

Again, there is in Rotherhithe a group of
ten houses called Dodd's Place. In those ten
houses, with a population of about fifty, ten
persons died of cholera in eighteen hundred
and forty-nine. There was then a stagnant