There are the thirteen improved houses in
Wild Court, let out in a hundred and eight
separate rooms, at a weekly rent of from
one and eightpence to three shillings. They
contain a population of about three hundred
and fifty, one half of them children, and
they are in good demand; but there is
no list of applicants for vacancies, one or two
rooms being always empty. "This," says
the superintendent, "is because of the
neighbourhood, and because there are still a good
many low Irish, who keep the decent,
respectable English from living there." Eleven
similar houses, but of a somewhat lower
character, containing two hundred and sixty-
three people, in eighty-six rooms, are in
Clark's Buildings, where a new resident
superintendent is trying to induce a better
class of persons to reside. But the Medical
Officer of Health asks, "in what way is the
condition of the labouring classes improved, if
the superintendent gets rid of the labouring
man from his renovated dwelling, in favour of
a superior class of persons, clerks, postmen,
milliners, and artisans?" The houses in
George Street lodge very comfortably a
hundred single men: their lodging-house in
Charles Street, Drury Lane, holds not quite
so many; and the house in King Street,
Drury Lane, holds five and twenty. That is
the sum of the work done here on behalf of
wholesome dwellings for the poor.

As we have said, there is no general
hospital in Saint Giles's. The Lying-in
Hospital, in Endell Street, receives one or two
hundred cases in a twelvemonth. The
Bloomsbury Dispensary prescribes annually
for two or three thousand patients; and
there is also a smaller dispensary connected
with the Ragged Schools in Brewer's Court,
Great Wild Street.

Before we turn to the diseases of this
health district, a few more words must be
said of its diversity of character in divers
parts. Its sub-districts are the parish of
Saint George Bloomsbury, Saint Giles
South, and Saint Giles North. Saint George's
is the richest, Saint Giles's South the poorest
of the three. Saint Giles's North contains
Church Lane, but it contains also Bedford
Square, and holds, therefore, the middle
place as to its average prosperity. In Saint
Giles's South the density of population on the
inhabited acres—all free spaces being left
out of account—is more than twice as great
as in Saint George's Bloomsbury.

Again, as to the number of children under
five years old in the district, which is less
than in the rest of the town, Saint George's
Bloomsbury goes far to secure that result,
for it contains scarcely more than three-
fourths of the number of such children that
would be found in an equal population
elsewhere in London. That is, probably, because
this district is occupied by many men who
have earned somewhat late in life the power
of moving to large houses with families of
children that lived elsewhere when they
were younger and before their parents had
made good way in the world. In Saint Giles's
South, however, there is also a deficiency of
children; but it is much less marked. The
reason just given accounts for the fact that
in Saint George's Bloomsbury there are
much fewer births than in the town at large,
only two dozen instead of nearly three dozen
a year to every thousand. But Saint Giles's
South exceeds the three dozen. Then,
however, in Bloomsbury there is only one child
in fifty born out of wedlock, while among the
inhabitants of Saint Giles's South every eighth
child is so born.

The maid-servants in the census give to
Bloomsbury more than the usual excess of
females in the population. But it is a
singular fact that in Saint Giles's South, at
the census of eighteen hundred and fifty-one,
there were found to be two hundred and
forty-five more males than females; a reversal
of the almost constant rule that men are
outnumbered by the women.

That is the district. Now let us stand at
the churchyard gates, and see what enters
them. About every second coffin is that of
a child less than five years old. Of a
thousand persons dying in Saint Giles's three
hundred and sixty are not two years old, and
of those in the thousand who survive their
second year another hundred and seventeen
perish before they have reached the age of
five.

The natural death-rate, hardly exceeded
indeed in Bloomsbury, is of seventeen persons
annually out of every thousand. To have
established that rate throughout London
would have been, last year, to have saved
nearly fifteen thousand lives. But if the
whole town had been in the position of Saint
Giles's, sixteen thousand persons more would
have been lost. Between the death-rate of
Lewisham and the death-rate of Saint Giles's,
if either were to prevail over the whole town,
the difference would be a saving or a loss of
thirty thousand lives every year. The death-
rate is higher in Saint Giles's than even in
the adjoining districts of the Strand, Holborn,
and Saint Martin's. "Holborn," says Dr.
Buchanan, "situated on a lower level, with
houses as crowded together and as poor as
Saint Giles's, with almost as many Irish among
its residents, comprising in its boundaries
the hopeless maze of courts and alleys about
Gray's Inn Lane—this district of Holborn, in
every respect so similar to our own, had only
two hundred and forty deaths last year,
where Saint Giles's had two hundred and
eighty-six." A climax is found for this
picture of distress when we have learnt that,
as matters stand, the comparison promises to
become every year more unfavourable to
Saint Giles's. Last year the death-rate of all
London was twenty-two in ten thousand
below the average of the preceding ten years.
In the southern districts the improvement was