ditch before the houses. That has been filled
up, and Dodd's Place has since been remarkably
free from disease. In eighteen hundred
and fifty-four, only three persons in it were
attacked by cholera, and not one died. We
come to a more fashionable quarter for
one other instance. Dr. Lankester is medical
officer of health for St. James's, Westminster.
He tells us that in the unhealthy Berwick
Street division are the model lodging-houses,
called Ingestre Buildings. Their mortality
last year was at the rate of sixteen in a
thousand. With that he contrasts a part of
the St. James's Square division—-Burlington
Arcade. The rooms there are narrow and
small, imperfectly ventilated, and, although
not overcrowded, shorten life. The mortality
last year among residents in Burlington
Arcade was at the rate of thirty in a thousand.

Now, let us turn from Saint James to Saint
Giles.

Dr. George Buchanan, Medical Officer of
Health for Saint Giles, tells us that " the
present mortality among infants in Saint
Giles's is such, that a child two years old
has a better chance of living to be fifty,
than a child at its birth has of living to be
two years old." And so we turn over a new
leaf in the history of London during this its
healthy year. The little children form by
far the largest class of victims to the poisoning
or stinting of our air and food. In foul
homes the mortality of children tends to
multiply itself, for where more children die,
more children are born to feed the jaws of
death. Partly this happens, because the
perishing of unweaned infants from the
mother's breast is followed speedily by new
creations. But there must be another law of
nature working, to produce a result so striking
as that in healthy districts, where there
is one death in fifty-six people, there is one
birth in forty-two; but that in unhealthy districts
where there is one death in thirty-three
people, there is one birth in twenty-eight. We
take this into account then, in considering the
large sum of the mortality of infants. Were
everything as it should be, the death of a
young child, except by accident, would be a
rare event. Little ones inheriting no weakness
from their parents, breathing pure air,
eating pure bread, and drinking the due
quantity of wholesome milk, would grow to
sturdy manhood, and to comely womanhood,
but there would not be so many of them
growing. Families would be little larger
than they now are, but they would be
composed more entirely of children upon the
knee, and by the fireside: not many would be
moved into the little coffin from the cot.
We know what the truth is. Dr. Pavy,
Medical Officer of Health for Saint Luke's,
tells that in the Old Street district of his
parish, the actual number of the deaths
during the healthy year of which we
write, was forty-four, twenty-six of them
being deaths of children under five years old,
and eighteen the sum of deaths at every
other age. In the City Road district, there
died forty-one infants, against twenty-six
persons of every age older than five. In the
Whitecross Street distinct, there were seventy-
seven deaths, of which no less than fifty-nine
were deaths of infants under five years old.
Three burials in every four were burials of
little children.

This is, by far, the worst fact of its kind
to be found in the whole budget of sanitary
reports now before us. The worst that can
be generally said (and with all its local variations,
it is a distressing feature in each parish
account) is, that one half the deaths are
deaths of children under five. And then, as
Dr. Barnes reminds the vestry at Shoreditch,
of all the children born among us, only one
half live to the age of fifteen; only one in
three lives to be older than forty; only one
in five lives to be sixty-one.

To account for such figures as these, we
will now take from the reports one or two
illustrations of what may be found in London
in a healthy year, to warn us how much
wholesomer and healthier we may become.
Turner's Retreat, Bermondsey, is cited by
Dr. Challice, officer of health for that parish,
as a fever-nest inhabited by persons not of
the poorest description, many of whom are
very cleanly in their habits, but who are
poisoned by want of drainage, who live beset
by their own offscourings in a court soaked
by a neighbouring yard in which a
manufacturer keeps a strong solution of dogs'
excrement (technically called pure) adjacent to
the public thoroughfare. We will quote
only one passage more—-it is from the
Rotherhithe report. We sicken as we read of such
homes. They sicken and die, who have to
live in them. In Spreadeagle Court " almost
all the houses were overcrowded with
inmates, dilapidated, and swarming with bugs.
Many of the inhabitants complained that the
quantity of water forced on by the company
was not sufficient, and certainly the
receptacles for it were not generally large enough,
and often dirty and leaky. The drainage has
been originally good, but is everywhere
choked up. Not a house had an ashpit, the
vegetable and animal refuse being strewn
about the yards, and mixing their effluvia with
those from the overflowing cesspools."

We can quote no more of such details.
They abound in the reports, and we know
that they must abound. The late Sir Henry
de la Beche informed me, writes Dr.
Lankester of the court district, that when the
School of Mines was built on the space
between Jermyn Street and Piccadilly,
formerly known as Derby Court, no less than
thirty-two cesspools had to be emptied and
filled up. There is plenty of work, then, to
be done everywhere by the boards of works,
medical officers of health, and inspectors of
nuisances; and in each of the reports before
us there is an accurate chronicle of work