Part 33

III. Gentlemen, in concluding this report, I will not attempt to disguise from you that it has been written under feelings of considerable apprehension; and I am fully conscious that, in thus expressing myself, I am liable to the imputation of raising unnecessary alarm.

If the possible mischief to be wrought by epidemic Cholera lay in some fixed inflexible fate, whatever opinion or knowledge I might hold on the subject of its return, silence would be better than speech; and I could gladly refrain from vexing the public ear by gloomy forebodings of an inevitable future.

But from this supposition the case differs diametrically: and the people of England are not like timid cattle, capable, only when blindfold, of confronting danger. It belongs to their race--it belongs to their dignity of manhood, to take deliberate cognisance of their foes, and not lightly to cede the victory. A people that has fought the greatest battles--not of arms alone, but of genius and skilful toil, is little likely to be scared at the necessity of meeting large danger by appropriate devices of science. A people that has inaugurated railways--that has spanned the Menai Strait and reared the Crystal Palace, can hardly fear the enterprise of draining poison from its infected towns. A people that has freed its foreign slaves at twenty millions’ ransom, will never let its home population perish, for cheapness sake, in the ignominious ferment of their filth.

Therefore, gentlemen, advisedly I state the danger as it seems to me. England has again become subject to a plague, the recurrence of which--or the duration--or the malignity, no human being can predict.

But, if I state the danger, so likewise, to the best of my belief, I state the remedy and defence. Colossal statistics concur with the results of detailed inspection, to refer this disease, in common with many others that scourge our population, distinctly and infallibly, to the working of local causes--of causes susceptible of removal--of causes which it devolves on our Legislature to remove.

The exemption we seek is worth a heavy purchase. My thoughts turn involuntarily to the epidemics of former centuries, to their frequent returns and immense fatality. I reflect on the Plague, and how it influenced the average death-rate of London; how in 1593 it doubled it, in 1603 trebled it, in 1625 quadrupled it: and how (after a less considerable visitation in 1636) it actually multiplied the mortality sevenfold in the tremendous epidemic of ‘65. The ravages of that pestilence are best appreciated in the fact, that we esteem the Great Fire of London a cheap equivalent for their arrest; looking to that eventful conflagration of the metropolis with gratitude, rather than horror, because of the mightier evils that were extinguished with its flames.

To so frightful a development as this, Cholera, by many degrees, has not attained; but, ignorant as we are of its laws and resources, we dare not surmise, at any renewed invasion, what increment of severity it may have won. In the simple fact, that our country has again become subject to pestilential epidemics, there lies an amount of threat only to be measured by those who are conversant, by history or experience, with the possible developments of such disease.

Therefore, gentlemen, having the deepest assurance that these unexplored possibilities of evil may be foreclosed by appropriate means, I should ill deserve your confidence if I shrank from setting before you--however ungracious the task--my deliberate estimate of the peril.

It pertains to my local office to tell you of local cures; and this I have sought to do. I have suggested that, by active superintendence of all houses within your jurisdiction, there may be suppressed in detail those several causes of the disease which arise in individual neglect; that, by elaborate care as to the cleanliness of pavements, markets, docks, and sewers, something may be done towards the mitigation of more general causes; that, by a well-organised system of medical visitation, very much may be effected towards encountering attacks of the disease, while still amenable to treatment:--that these, with similar precautions, are therefore to be recommended.

And not for a moment would I seem to depreciate such measures, palliative only, and partial though they be. By their judicious application, from Aldgate to the Temple, life may possibly be saved to some hundreds; to children that are fondly loved, to parents that are the stay of numbers.

But against the full significance of any epidemic, I am bound to tell you that these are but poor substitutes for protection. To render them effectual, even in their narrow sphere of operation, there must be great vigilance and great expenditure; a weary vigilance and a disproportionate expenditure, because chiefly given to defeat in detail what should have been prevented in principle. And be done what may, in this palliative spirit, the sources of the disease are substantially unstayed: for the faults, to which its metropolitan prevalence is due, consist not simply in a number of individual mismanagements, but include a common and radical mal-construction as their chief.

No city, so far as Science may be trusted, can deserve immunity from epidemic disease, except by making absolute cleanliness the first law of its existence; such cleanliness, I mean, as consists in the perfect adaptation of drainage, water-supply, scavenage, and ventilation, to the purposes they should respectively fulfil; such cleanliness, as consists in carrying away by these means, inoffensively, all refuse materials of life--gaseous, solid, or fluid, from the person, the house, the factory, or the thoroughfare, so soon as possible after their formation, and with as near an approach, as their several natures allow, to one continuous current of removal.

To realise for London this conception of how a city should cleanse itself may involve, no doubt, the perfection of numberless details. Yet, most of all, it would pre-suppose a comprehensive organisation of plan and method: not alone for that intramural unity of system which is needful for all the works, as most for those of drainage and water-supply; but, equally, to harmonise these works with other extramural arrangements for utilising to the country the boundless wealth of metropolitan refuse--for distributing to the uses of agriculture what is then rescued from the character of filth--for requiting to the fields in gifts for vegetation, what they have rendered to the town in food for man.

How far the construction of London has proceeded on the recognition of such objects, or how far the advantages of such a plan have been realised, it could only be a mockery to ask. Our metropolis, by successive accretions, has covered mile after mile of land. Each new addition has been made with scarcely more reference to the legitimate necessities of life, than if it had clustered there by crystallisation. With no scientific forecast to plan the whole, with little but chance and cheapness to shape the parts, our desultory architecture has eclipsed the conditions of health. Draining up-hill or down-hill, as the case might be, and running their aqueducts at random from chalk-quarries or river-mud; or ponding sewage in their cellars, and digging beside it for water; blocking-up the inlets of freshness and, equally, the outlets of nuisance; constructing sewers to struggle with the Thames--now to pollute its ebb, now to be obstructed by its flow; the builders of many generations have accumulated sanitary errors in so intricate a system, that their apprehension and their cure seem equally remote.

Therefore--by reason of causes, ramified through the whole metropolis and deep-rooted in its soil, which bind all parts together in one common endurance of their effects--therefore cannot epidemic disease be conquered by any exertions or by any amelioration, short of the complete and comprehensive cure. Against the danger we dread, no shelter is to be found in petty reforms and patchwork legislation. Not to inspectorships of nuisances, but to the large mind of State-Policy, one must look for a real emancipation from this threatening plague.

A child’s intellect can appreciate the wild absurdity of seeking at Peru what here runs to waste beneath our pavements,--of ripening only epidemic disease with what might augment the food of the people--of waiting, like our ancestors, to expiate the neglected divinity of water in some bitter purgation by fire.

But it needs the grasp of political mastership, not uninformed by Science, to convert to practical application these obvious elements of knowledge; to recognise a national object irrelevant to the interests of party; to lift an universal requirement from the sphere of professional jealousies, and to found in immutable principles the sanitary legislation of a people.

I have the honour to remain,

&c. &c.

APPENDIX OF TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE SANITARY CONDITION OF THE CITY OF LONDON.

I. Area and Population of the several Districts and Sub-districts of the City.

II. Quinquennial Synopsis of City Mortality, from Michaelmas 1848 to Michaelmas 1853; with Death-Rates calculated for this period, on the Population enumerated in 1851, for each District and Sub-District of the City.

III. First annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks dating from October 1st, 1848, to September 29th, 1849.

IV. Second annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 30th, 1840, to September 28th, 1850.

V. Third annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 29th, 1850, to September 27th, 1851.

VI. Fourth annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 28th, 1851, to September 25th, 1852.

VII. Fifth annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 26th, 1852, to September 24th, 1853.

VIII. Quinquennial Mortality, classified by Age; first, for the entire City; next, for the Three Unions severally.