drawn from gross averages, of the good result
that has rewarded the exertions of those men
who have laboured on behalf of public
health.

The terrible mortality caused by bronchitis,
pneumonia, and consumption, which together
kill— in England and Wales only— a hundred
thousand people every year (being one-fourth
of the entire mortality from more than a
hundred other causes in addition to themselves)
should make us think a little seriously
of many things, and not least seriously of the
freaks of fashion which set climate at defiance.
Why do we send children abroad in damp and
cold weather with their legs bare, submitted,
tender as their bodies are, to risks that even
strong adults could not brave with impunity?
Custom has made this matter appear
familiar and trifling, but it is not out of place
to say, at the beginning of another winter,
that the denial to young children of proper
skirts to their clothes and warm coverings to
their legs has sown the seeds of consumption
in thousands and thousands, and is of many
dangerous things done in obedience to laws of
fashion, the one that is most thoughtless
and most cruel.

It is in the child that consumption can
most readily be planted—in the child, that
when the tendency exists, it can be conquered,
if at all. It is to be fought against by protecting
the body with sufficient clothing against
chill and damp, by securing it plenty of
wholesome sleep,— not suffocative sleep among
feathers and curtains, plenty of free ablution
without prejudices on behalf of water,
icy cold, plenty of cheerful exercise short
of fatigue, plenty of meat, and bread, and
wholesome pudding. Those indeed are the
things wanted by all children. Many a child
pines in health upon a diet stinted with the
best intentions. But the truth is, that it is
not possible to over-feed a child with simple
wholesome eatables. It can be stimulated to
excess in the demolishing of sickly dainties;
and, with a stomach once fairly depraved, may
be made incompetent to say when it has had
too little or too much. But a child fed only
upon wholesome things knows better than
any mamma can tell when it wants more; it
can eat a great deal; has not only to
maintain life, but to add height and breadth to
stature. Fortify it, then, against variations of
climate, by meeting freely the demands of its
body; give it full animal vigour to resist
unwholesome impressions. Especially let the
good housewife, who has a young family to
feed, learn to be utterly reckless as to the
extent of her milk-score. Somebody has
declared a pint of milk to contain as much
nourishment as half a pound of meat. Be
that as it may, it is the right food for little
ones to thrive upon, and may save much
subsequent expenditure for cod-liver oil.

Still reading together the three years
already named, we come to the heading
Education, and there find that, in the primary
schools of England and Wales, there was an
annual increase of about seventy thousand in
the number of school children brought under
inspection. More than four times as many
children are accommodated in the
church-schools as in the schools of English
denominations not connected with the Church;
but the schools of the Dissenters grow the faster
in proportion.

Omitting the odd hundreds and tens, there
was an average of three hundred thousand
children actually in attendance at
church-schools in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-four. Had the subsequent increase been at the
same rate as that of "British, Wesleyan and
other Presbyterian schools not connected with
the Church of England," the number next
year should have been nine thousand greater
than it was; and in the year after next, the
attendance at church-schools was twenty-one
thousand short of what it would have
been had they kept pace with Protestant
schools unconnected with the Church in
their development. The registered average
attendance at the Roman Catholic schools, in
Great Britain, was a thousand less in the
last than in the first of the three years, and
in the second of the years fell four or five
thousand below what seems to be its usual
mark—not thirty thousand at the best. There
is matter in these figures for some very
obvious reflections.

It is less satisfactory to observe in another
table, that, while there is throughout Great
Britain a decided increase in the school
attendance of children under the age of
seven, there is an actual falling off in the
attendance of all children above that age.
This falling off is most apparent in the
English church-schools, and partly for a very
creditable reason; the greater extension of
the infant school system, which has increased
the proportion of the youngest children.
At the same time the tables show that there
is a decidedly superior tendency in the
schools of the English Dissenters to retain
children of a more advanced age; that, in
this respect, the English Roman Catholic
schools fall very short of them both; and
that they are all very distinctly beaten by
the schools of Scotland. All of these contain
double the proportion of pupils older than
fourteen, than is to be found in the most
prosperous of the primary schools of England.
On the other hand, if the schools of the
Church of England receive on the whole
younger pupils, they retain them longer
under training, than the schools of the English
Dissenters. A little more than five in a hundred
of the children in our church-schools,
but not quite four per cent, in the British
and other schools, remain longer than four
years.  In the Roman Catholic schools this
number is but two per cent., but it is six and
seven per cent, in all Scotch schools, except
those of the Episcopal Church.  In the
schools of the English Protestant Dissenters,