Chapter II: Part 2

The air is still more alive than the land. Insects fill the lower strata of the atmosphere to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, like a condensed vapour. It is estimated that a cubic foot of air is often peopled by a million of winged insects, which contain a caustic and venomous liquid, several species being nearly two lines (1.8) long.

When two persons who have their home in these regions meet in the morning, the first questions they address to each other are, “How did you find the zancudoes during the night?” “How are we to-day for the mosquitoes?” An ancient form of Chinese politeness, showing the ancient state of that country, was—“Have you been incommoded in the night by serpents?”

It appears that there are still inhabited places in which the Chinese compliment on the serpents might be added to that of the mosquitoes.

Proportionate to this prodigality of organic life is the amount of organic decomposition, the products of which are poured into the atmosphere and suspended in the surrounding vapour and fog,[11] to which they give a decided and often a highly offensive odour.

Footnote 11:

See note, p. 16.

“On fixing our eyes on the tops of the trees,” describes Humboldt, “we discovered streams of vapour wherever a solar ray penetrated and traversed the dense atmosphere, exhaling, together with the aromatic odour yielded by the flowers, the fruit, and even the wood, that peculiar odour which we perceive in autumn in foggy seasons. It might be said, that notwithstanding the elevated temperature the air cannot dissolve the quantity of water exhaled from the surface of the soil and of the vegetation.”

“At the distance of several miles from the coast,” says Dr Daniell, in describing the western shores of Africa, “the peculiar odour arising from swampy exhalations and the decomposition of vegetable matter is very perceptible, and sometimes even offensive. The water also is frequently of a dusky hue, with leaves, branches, and other vegetable debris floating on the surface, brought down from the interior by innumerable narrow channels that empty their turbid streams into the open ocean.”

It is under these climatic conditions that the worst forms of epidemics are engendered: the most sudden in their attack, the most rapid in their development, the most general in their prevalence, and the most mortal.

The form of the epidemic prevalent in any particular district is dependent on the physical characters of the immediate neighbourhood. Thus intermittents prevail chiefly in marshy and swampy districts: remittents also chiefly there, though not exclusively; while in other localities other forms arise approximating to the continued type of temperate climates.

For the most part these epidemics are strictly endemic, and are confined to the particular regions in which they are engendered. They never pass the limit of the equatorial or tropical zone. Yellow Fever, one of the most common and destructive of these diseases, is still more restricted in its range, being confined within a definite line determined by temperature. It is incapable of existing where the average range of the thermometer is greater than from 76° to 86° of Fahrenheit, or where the temperature varies more than from 5° to 10° night and day. Extreme heat and moderate cold immediately stop it; nay, even the prevalence of a cold wind for a few hours only.

In other instances these epidemics pass beyond the regions in which they are produced, and sometimes extend to all the other quarters of the globe. The Black Death, the range of which we have seen, was engendered in China; the Cholera of our own day, generated in the delta of the Ganges, the great source and centre of Indian epidemics, ravaged that country long before it directed its course to Europe.

When these tropical epidemics advance into more temperate climes, they lay aside nothing of their nature; they lose but little of their power. Wherever they go they decimate the populations which they attack.

One remarkable peculiarity of some of these epidemics is, that natives of the region in which they prevail are for the most part unsusceptible to them. This is true however only of particular forms of pestilence. Some of them acknowledge no acclimation. Cholera, for example, attacks equally natives and new comers. On the other hand, yellow fever rarely attacks the natives who reside permanently within its zone. Its chief victims are strangers who have recently arrived within its sphere, particularly the inhabitants of northern climates. The susceptibility to its influence appears to be strictly proportionate to the degree of northern latitude from which the stranger has arrived, and the shortness of the interval that has passed since he left the European for the Equatorial regions.

We see something of the same kind in the wide-spread epidemics of our own country. During the prevalence of Cholera it was observed over and over again, that persons coming directly from the pure air of the country into the infected part of a town, were seized with the disease. The explanation is not obvious. It would seem, however, to be connected with the suddenness of the shock on the system. Priestley found, that after shutting up a mouse in a given quantity of air a considerable time, it seemed to be weak, and to be slowly dying. If at this period he put a fresh mouse into the same air, it instantly died. It seems as if the system can bear a pestiferous atmosphere better when gradually than when suddenly exposed to it.

I do not know that I can give a more vivid picture of a tropical epidemic than that which is afforded by the outbreak of Cholera in the 86th regiment at Kurrachee in June, 1846.

On this occasion the atmosphere was very peculiar,—damp, hot, stagnant, and oppressive. Not a breath of air was stirring. A few isolated cases of cholera had occurred for some days. The utmost alarm was excited in the minds of experienced persons, who felt certain that an epidemic was at hand. Their fears were too fully realized. On the night of the 15th, upwards of 40 men were seized with cholera in its severest form; in two days more 256 were attacked, of whom 131 were already dead.

“The floors of the hospital,” says Dr Thom, the surgeon of the regiment, “were literally strewed with the livid bodies of men labouring under the pangs of premature dissolution. Many were brought in with the cold and clammy damp of death; as if sudden obstruction of every vital function had taken place, and the fountains of life had been arrested by an invisible but instantaneous shock. It was indeed a sight never to be forgotten, to behold the powerful frames of the finest men of a fine corps, who had that morning been in apparent good health, and most of them on the evening parade, as if at once stricken down, and striving, with the last efforts of gigantic strength, to resist a death-call that would not be refused.”

In describing a river on the west coast of Africa, Dr Daniell says—“When I visited it, I found two vessels moored a short distance from its mouth, one of which within the space of five months had buried two entire crews, a solitary person alone surviving. The other, which had arrived at a much later period, had been similarly deprived of one-half of its men, and the remainder were in such a debilitated condition as to be incapable of undertaking any active or laborious duty. Immediately before, another vessel had sailed from this port in such a deplorable state as to be solely dependent on the aid of Kroomen to perform the voyage.”

In the statistical report of Sir Alexander Tulloch it is stated, that out of 1658 white troops sent out to military stations on the western coast of Africa, 1271 perished from climatic diseases; while of the 387 who remained to be sent home, 17 died on their passage; 157 were reported as incapable of further service; and 180 as qualified only for garrison service; thus leaving only 33 out of 1658 men who were fit for active service.

As we pass out of the torrid zone a remarkable change takes place in the general character of epidemics. They lose more and more of their intermittent type, and become either remittent or continued. The remittent keeps its hold over the southern part of Europe, and continually breaks out in the form of Yellow Fever. As we proceed northward out of the yellow fever zone, that disease wholly disappears, and typhus and its kindred maladies take its place; typhus commencing precisely at the point where yellow fever ends.

There is, indeed, one of the ordinary diseases of temperate climes, and only one, which appears capable of penetrating within the torrid zone, and of committing greater ravages there than in lower temperatures, and that is Small-pox. With this exception, the ordinary epidemics of temperate climates do not enter the tropics, while, on the other hand, the ordinary epidemics of the tropics every now and then decimate the temperate regions.

“In these our latitudes,” says Dr William Fergusson, “cold and fatigue, and sorrow and hunger, will generate fever anywhere; but every region, every climate, will exhibit its own form of fever. With us it is Typhus; in the warmer countries of Europe, Remittent; in the upper Mediterranean, Plague; in the Antilles and Western Africa, Yellow Fever; this last being restricted to particular localities, temperatures, and elevation. While typhus fever goes out when you enter the tropics, it is there that yellow fever commences; the pure epidemic of a hot climate that cannot be transported or communicated upon any other ground. Places, not persons, constitute the rule of its existence. Places, not persons, comprehend the whole history, the etiology of the disease. Places, not persons! Let the emphatic words be dinned into the ears of the Lords of the Treasury, of Trade and Plantations, until they acquire the force of a creed, which will save them hereafter from the absurdity of enforcing a quarantine[12] in England against an amount of solar heat of which its climate is insusceptible. Let them further be repeated in the Schools of Medicine until the Professors become ashamed of imbuing the minds of the young with prejudice and false belief, which, should they ever visit warmer climates, may cause them to be eminently mischievous in vexing the commerce and deeply and injuriously agitating the public mind of whatever community may have received them.”

Footnote 12:

See Cases of the Eclair, Dygden, &c., _post._

Climate differs not only in different countries but in different parts of the same country. The climate of the country is different from that of the city. The climate of every city, town, and village, differs from that of every other. The temperature, the moisture, and the other meteorological conditions of different districts, nay, even of different streets in the same town, vary to such a degree as to influence materially their relative salubrity and the prevalence or absence of particular classes of disease. These local climatic conditions and their connection with prevalent diseases, have not as yet received due attention: when they shall have received it—and they will receive it—a new light will be shed on local epidemics.

* * * * *

I pass now to CIVILIZATION.

We have no sufficient knowledge of the state of the people and of their diseases, in any of the civilized nations of antiquity, to trace the relation between them. The authentic history of periods, comparatively near to our own time, as far as concerns the diseases of the people, goes scarcely further back than the 14th century. The first great epidemic, to which I have so often called attention, occurred in that century, and we have reliable evidence, both of the phenomena attending this plague and the condition of the people at that time. I assume this period therefore as my starting-point.

I take a civilized community to be one in which there exist—

1. A sovereign authority.

2. Laws incorruptibly administered.

3. Physical comfort generally diffused.

4. Intellectual development and activity generally diffused.

5. Recognition of the fundamental principles of religion and morality.

Without the two first, there can be no security for life and property, both of which must be placed in absolute and unquestionable safety before a single step can be taken out of the lowest depth of barbarism. Without the two last, none of the others can be acquired. These conditions are therefore the basis of the pyramid of society.

Taking these then as the essential constituents of civilization, and applying them as a test to Great Britain, we shall see that at the commencement of the 14th century England was in a state of barbarism, since every one of these elements was wanting, although the foundation of political and social institutions containing the germs of liberty and progress had been already laid.

Practically, however, at that period there was no sovereign authority, for the king had no sufficient power to maintain order, to protect the rights and liberties of the people, or to defend his own throne against armed men nominally his subjects; while the lord of every feudal castle exercised a more perfect sovereignty over his vassals than the so-called monarch over the nation.

Every town was a fortress, and every house in which it was safe to dwell a castle, the inmates of which, like people in a garrison, constantly held themselves prepared to resist attack, from which they were never secure. They slept with arms at their side.

Marauders openly encamped on the public roads for the plunder of the wayfarer, which often ended in his murder. Few persons ventured to travel alone, and none without the reasonable apprehension that they might never return alive.

Scarcely a third part of the area of the kingdom was under cultivation. The remainder consisted of moor, forest, and fen. Vast tracts were under water during the greater part of the year, and at other times formed morasses, marshes, and swamps.

Immediately beyond the walls that encompassed the towns were large stagnant ditches, which being the nearest receptacles for refuse, were full of all sorts of decomposing filth.

The streets were narrow, unpaved, undrained, uncleansed, and unlighted. There was no provision for the removal of the town refuse. Gutters were formed at the sides of the streets, as in Bethnal Green and the neglected parts of all our towns at the present time, into which the inhabitants threw the refuse of their houses; forming in dry weather a semi-fluid mass of corrupting animal and vegetable matter, and in rainy weather black turbid rivulets which ultimately poured their contents into some water-course.

The houses were mean and squalid, built of wood and wattles, thatched with straw, without chimneys, the windows without glass, the floors without boards, the furniture of the rudest description; the use of linen was scarcely known; common straw formed the king’s bed. “The floors,” says Erasmus, writing two centuries later, “generally are made of nothing but loam, and are strewed with rushes, which being constantly put on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases for twenty years; with fish bones, broken victuals, the dregs of tankards, and impregnated with other filth underneath, from dogs and men.” Contemporary writers concur in representing the offensive odour of decaying straw and rushes as universal in the houses.

There was no knowledge of the art of collecting, preserving, and storing fodder. The animals for winter food were slaughtered in autumn, and their flesh salted or smoked. It was only during three months of the year, from Midsummer to Michaelmas, that any fresh animal food, excepting game and river fish, was tasted even by the nobles of the land. The common people subsisted chiefly on salted beef, veal, and pork, the price of which was one-half less than that of wheat in the time of Henry VIII.

There were no fresh vegetables. As late as the 18th century salads were sent from Holland for the table of Queen Caroline. Sir John Pringle, writing in the middle of the last century, states that his father’s gardener told him that in the time of his grandfather cabbages were sold for a crown a-piece. It was not until towards the close of the 16th century (1585) that the potato was first brought to England, where it was limited to the garden for at least a century and a half after it had been planted by Sir Walter Raleigh in his own garden. It was first cultivated as a field crop in Scotland so recently as the year 1752.

For many centuries England remained in the condition of country in which no more subsistence is produced than is barely sufficient for the necessities of the people. Consequently every year of scarcity became a year of famine, and such years, about one in ten, occurred for ages with great regularity, and often equalled in their terrible results the worst famines of antiquity.

In a cold climate fuel is nearly as important as food, for which indeed it is a substitute. A large portion of our daily food is used up in supporting that internal fire by which the heat of the human body in every climate, and under every variety of external temperature, is maintained at the 98th degree of Fahrenheit. The greater the loss of heat by cooling, the greater the amount of heat which the body itself must generate to maintain its temperature at this elevated point. This demand for additional heat cannot be supplied without additional quantities of food, and unless these supplies are afforded, the substance of the body itself, its very tissues and organs, are consumed; a process which cannot be continued long without exhaustion, disease, and death. The phrase “starved by cold” expresses a more literal fact than is commonly understood. Unhappily the circumstances which deprive a population of the means of counteracting cold limit also the supplies of food at their command, and the pressure of the twofold privation, want of food and want of fuel, commonly occurs at the very season when both these indispensable supports of life are most needed. Some conception may be formed of the suffering to which our ancestors were exposed from this cause, from the fact that their prejudice against the use of coal as an article of fuel was such that a law was passed rendering it a capital offence to burn it within the City, and there is a record in the Tower importing that a person was tried, convicted, and executed for this offence in the reign of Edward the First. It was not until the reign of Charles the First that there was a regular supply of coals to London.

The habits of the people increased the force of these privations. Intemperance was a national vice. Excessive carousing at home, or days and nights spent in taverns, was the usual practice among all classes, and the physical and moral evils resulting from the custom were neither redeemed nor lessened by the epithet which these habitual convivialities appear to have conferred upon the nation of “Merrie England.” Caius, indeed, one of the most celebrated physicians of the sixteenth century, couples Germany and the Netherlands with England in this common reproach. “These three nations,” he says, “destroy more meats and drynkes without all order, convenient time, reason, and necessitie, than all other countries under the son, to the great annoyance of their bodies and wittes.”

This condition of the country and this mode of life themselves constitute the most powerful causes of epidemics; and an extraordinary concurrence and concentration of these causes are manifested in the combination of the circumstances which have been enumerated, namely, in the malarious state of the greater part of the kingdom, in the confined space of the towns, in the deficiency and putrescency of the food, in the inadequacy of the means of protection from cold, and in the intemperance of the people. These were the true sources of the malignity and mortality of the pestilences of that age.

We have no reliable evidence of the actual mortality produced by these terrible diseases; for no physician has left such an account of the epidemics of which he was an eye-witness as enables us to determine it, and there was no Registrar-General to fill up the momentous columns included in his death-roll. We can therefore only take the statements of the time as we find them.

According to the accounts of contemporary writers, the Black Death swept away, within the space of four years, a fourth part of the population of Europe. Some towns in England are stated to have lost two-thirds of their inhabitants, and it is computed that one-half of the entire population of the country perished.

Of the Sweating Sickness, Bacon says it “destroyed infinite persons;” Stowe “a wonderful number;” and other writers reckon the deaths in the places attacked by thousands.

Similar representations are given of the ravages of the Plague, of the Petechial Fever, and even occasionally of Intermittent Fever; and the substantial correctness of these statements is confirmed by entries in parish registers still extant, which tell the story of the local outbreaks of those days with graphic and touching simplicity.

During some of the worst of these visitations, contemporary writers concur in stating that the living were insufficient to bury the dead; business was suspended; the courts of law were closed; the churches were deserted for want of a sufficient number of clergy to perform the service; and ships were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.

We can form no adequate conception of the terror inspired by these events. We have seen alarm in our own day, but then it bordered on maniacal despair. It seemed as if the last judgment had come upon the world, and men abandoned alike their possessions and their friends. The rich gave up their treasures and laid them at the foot of the altars; neighbour abandoned neighbour; parents their offspring, and brothers their sisters. “If” says one of the chroniclers, “in a circle of friends any one only by a single word happened to bring the plague to mind, first one and then another of the company was seized with a tormenting anguish; certain that they were attacked with a mortal sickness, they slunk away home, and there soon yielded up the ghost.”

These fearful forms of pestilence were accompanied by moral epidemics more appalling than the physical. Of these the two following may serve as examples:—

Vast assemblages of men and women formed circles hand in hand, dancing, leaping, shouting, insensible to external impressions; some seeing visions and spirits whose names they shrieked out; others in epileptic convulsions with foaming at the mouth; all continuing to make the most violent muscular exertions for hours together, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. Lookers-on were seized with an uncontrollable impulse to join in these wild revels. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, servants their masters, boys and girls their parents, women their domestic duties, and men their business, thus to spend days and nights; these infatuated crowds passing furiously through streets, along highways, over fields, and from town to town. This madness pervaded the least barbarous countries of Europe for upwards of two centuries, under the name of the “Dancing Mania.” It was universally attributed to demoniacal possession, and its cure was attempted by exorcism. It was one expression and outlet of the violent passions of that time, imposture and profligacy playing principal parts in this strange drama.

More pernicious than this madness was the mania of cruelty, an especial manifestation of which was the ferocious persecution of the Jews, who were put to death by hundreds and thousands, under the accusation that they had poisoned the wells. At Basle a number of this nation, whose European history proves them to have been everywhere amongst the most inoffensive of the people, were enclosed in a wooden building and burnt with it. At Strasburg two thousand were burnt alive. Whoever showed them compassion and endeavoured to protect them were put upon the rack and burnt with them. In numerous instances these unhappy people, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, to which they set fire and consumed themselves with their families. The noble and the mean bound themselves by an oath to extirpate them from the face of the earth by fire and sword.

In England this relentless cruelty took particularly the shape of burning innocent people under the name of witches; an infatuation which pervaded all classes from the highest to the lowest, affording a melancholy exemplification of the close alliance between credulity and cruelty.[13]

Footnote 13:

The number of wretched beings condemned and executed for this
imaginary crime at the Assizes of Suffolk and Essex alone, in the year
1646, amounted to two hundred. Dr Zachary Gray affirms that he had
seen an authentic account of persons who had so suffered in the whole
of England, amounting to from three to four thousand. So late as the
year 1697 seven persons, three men and four women, were burnt at
Paisley for this alleged crime. We seldom sufficiently consider how
near we are to those times of dreadful superstition and cruelty! How
short a period it is since the light of a brighter day dawned upon us!

But in the midst of these terrible disorders, changes which had been in silent operation during several centuries began to produce visible results. The independent power of the nobles had been suppressed; the feuds that raged between them, filling the country with disorder and bloodshed, had been put down; the supremacy of the law had been established; property and life had become more secure; industry had taken a surprising start; the practical abolition of serfdom had been to a large extent effected; and at last came the final breaking up of the feudal system in the reign of Henry VII. by the passing of the law authorizing the alienation of land.

About the middle of the fifteenth century improvements in the condition of the people, which had been gradually effected by these changes, were accelerated by a succession of events that gave an extraordinary impulse to the human mind, just aroused from the long and deep sleep of the middle ages—that dark night which was now passing away.

Among the most memorable of these was the invention of printing, which the three immortal masters of the art had now completed (1436–1442), giving untiring and undying wings to thought;—

The diffusion over the West of Europe of the remains of a former civilization, by the dispersion of the treasures of classical art, literature, and science, which before Constantinople fell into the hands of barbarians (1453) had been confined within the walls of that city;—

The cessation of the long and disastrous struggle between the East and the West, by the expulsion of the Moors from Spain (1492);—

The discovery of the New World;—

And lastly, the Reformation, that stupendous work which with giant strength burst asunder the chain which consummate skill and supreme power had spent ages in forging and riveting: that stupendous work, which was not merely emancipation from spiritual bondage, but the re-communication of the long-lost spirit of religion; the noble men who achieved it being ever, even in their day of triumph, less intent on demolishing the gorgeous edifice that had held the mind enthralled, than on erecting a pure temple in which it might worship with sincerity and freedom.

The time when the foundation was laid for this intellectual and spiritual renovation was also that of the commencement of physical improvement. The towns being no longer fortresses, it became unnecessary to maintain their fortifications. Walls were thrown down; stagnant moats were filled up; broader streets were opened; more convenient houses were erected. Forests were cleared; marshes and swamps were drained; more land was brought under cultivation; more vegetable matter was produced; the art of collecting, storing, and preserving fodder was discovered. Fresh meat became the food of the people during a longer period of the year; in the course of two centuries the length of that period had doubled, and at last such food was in use the whole winter. The products of growing art and manufacture superseded the beds of straw and displaced the floors of rushes. Famines ceased. There has been no recurrence of famine in England since the middle of the 15th century (1448). The proportion of people in the enjoyment of moderate competence rapidly increased. It is computed that in the 16th century the number of small freeholders realizing a clear income of between £60 and £70 a-year amounted with their families to one-seventh of the whole population, and that the number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number of those who farmed the land of others.[14]

Footnote 14:

Macaulay’s History, Vol. I. Chap. III.

In the next century the care of the Public Health became a recognized and direct object of the Legislature and the Magistracy. Better regulations were enforced in the metropolis for the removal of filth, for the construction and extension of sewers, and for widening, paving, and lighting the streets. In the middle of this century the Great Fire (1666) consumed 13,000 houses and left an open space of upwards of a square mile. This opportunity of improvement was not lost. Though in rebuilding the city the same lines of streets were preserved, and the streets were still kept much too narrow, yet there was some improvement in the general plan, while the houses were built of better materials; brick was substituted for wood and plaster, and the buildings were less crowded and less projecting.

The spirit of improvement thus awakened exerted itself with increased effect during the whole of the eighteenth century. Agriculture, which was now rapidly advancing, had created a demand for town refuse, the fertilizing property of which began to be perceived; so that all manner of offensive substances were regularly carried away to the fields, to the great increase of the cleanliness of the streets. At the same time many of the narrower streets were widened, the houses were entirely taken down and rebuilt, and in this operation slate was universally substituted for thatch, and brick for timber. The pavement also, which had long been the reproach of London, was improved. Population in the mean time rapidly increased, less by the relative increase of the number of births than by the proportionate decrease of the deaths, and this notwithstanding the occasional occurrence of severe pestilence. The result of the whole was an increase in the length of life.

An increase in the length of life is an expression and a measure of the sum of comfort experienced from the whole collective circumstances that make up national prosperity. In the interval between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that sum grew into a highly important one. Of this the proof is positive.

It happened that in the year 1693 a loan was raised for the service of the State by the method of Tontine, and that another was contracted by the same method in the year 1790; the interval being almost exactly a century.

The term Tontine is derived from the name of the originator of this scheme of life annuity, the principle of which is this. The person who advances £100 is at liberty to name any life he pleases, during the existence of which he draws a certain annuity; and as the shares of the dead nominees are distributed among the living ones, the annuity continually increases till the last survivor gets the whole income.

A comparison of the experience between two Tontines gives the exact measure of the effect produced on the duration of life, by such changes in the social condition of the people as may have occurred in the interval between them.

A person of the male sex (for there is a considerable difference in the results in the two sexes), living in 1793, compared with a male living in 1690, at fifteen years of age, had gained an expectation of life of nearly ten years; at twenty years of age, nine years and a half; at twenty-five years of age, upwards of eight years; at thirty years of age, upwards of seven years, and so on.

Or the gain in the expectation of life may be stated more correctly in years, thus: Take for example a man at the age of 30, in 1693 his expectation of life would have been 26.665; in 1790 it would have been 33.775 years.

On this evidence Mr Finlaison justly observes that civilization could not have increased by a single leap in the time of Mr Pitt, but must have been slowly on the increase at least since the days of Queen Anne.

We may then fairly conclude, that in the interval between the close of the 17th and 18th centuries human life gained an addition equivalent to a fourth part of its whole term. What has it gained in the succeeding century? What has been the increase in the value of life in this first half of the century in which we ourselves have lived? Though unfortunately we can appeal to the results of no renewed tontine to enable us to answer this question with exactness,[15] yet there are not wanting evidences that the value of life continues progressively to increase. It must necessarily continue to increase, because the main conditions on which life and health depend have experienced, during the whole of the present century, an expansion and improvement, on which no former age presents a parallel. It will be sufficient to establish this fact, to glance at what has been effected within this period in the multiplication and diffusion of the three primary necessaries of existence—food, clothing, and fuel.

Such has been the increased production of food during the present century, that the quantity now raised maintains ten millions more human beings than existed at its commencement; for on the first enumeration of the people in 1801 the population of Great Britain was eleven millions; in 1851, it was twenty-one millions.[16]

Footnote 15:

Considering that there appears to be no objection in principle to the
method of raising a loan by Tontine, and that the scheme is a popular
one, it seems highly desirable that we should continue this means of
measuring with positive exactness the results of our advancing
civilization.

Footnote 16:

According to Mr Rickman, from the best information that can be
obtained from Doomsday Book, the population of England in the time of
William the Conqueror was 1½ millions.

In the reign of Edward the Third (1377), when a poll-tax was imposed
on all persons of both sexes above fourteen, it was 2½ millions.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at the period of the Spanish Armada,
it was 4 millions.

According to Mr Finlaison, at the close of the 16th century it was
somewhat under 5 millions two hundred thousand.

According to Mr Rickman, on a computation founded on the return of
Baptisms, as stated in the Abstract of Parish Registers, it was in
1700, 5½ millions; in 1750, 6½ millions; and in 1770, 7½ millions.

The first actual enumeration was made in 1801. The following table
exhibits the rate of increase in the population of Great Britain from
that time up to the enumeration in 1851:

┌──────┬────────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
│ │ │ INCREASE │ ANNUAL │
│YEARS.│POPULATION. │ Each │ RATE │
│ │ │Decennial │ of │
│ │ │ Period. │ Increase │
│ │ │ │per cent. │
├──────┼────────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
│ 1801 │ 10,917,433 │ │ │
│ 1811 │ 12,424,120 │1,506,687 │ 1.274 │
│ 1821 │ 14,402,643 │1,978,523 │ 1.489 │
│ 1831 │ 16,564,138 │2,161,495 │ 1.408 │
│ 1841 │ 18,813,786 │2,249,648 │ 1.279 │
│ 1851 │ 21,121,967 │2,308,181 │ 1.186 │
└──────┴────────────┴──────────┴──────────┘

This increased production of food consists chiefly of grain, green crops, and garden vegetables, countless in variety, and highly nutritious and grateful, completely reversing the nature of the national subsistence compared with that of former times, and giving to the masses of the people a constant and unfailing supply, winter and summer, of fresh vegetable nutriment.

This increased production of food is mainly of home growth, for the supply of wheat from foreign sources would scarcely suffice to afford to each person two gallons of flour annually.

This increased production has been obtained partly by a progressive increase in the quantity of land brought under cultivation, which now amounts for the United Kingdom to upwards of 40,000,000 of acres, by far the greater part of which is employed in the production of human food; and partly by the employment of capital in the improvement of the soil, by which large tracts that a few years ago were wholly sterile, or deemed incapable of producing wheat, now yield some of the finest grain in England.[17]

Footnote 17:

“In 1821 almost the only grain produced in the Fens of
Cambridgeshire consisted of oats; since then, by draining and
manuring, the capability of the soil has been so changed that these
fens now produce some of the finest wheat that is grown in England;
and this more costly grain now constitutes the main dependence of
the farmers in a district where 14 years ago its produce was
scarcely attempted.”—_Porter’s Progress of the Nation._

This increased fertility of the soil renders it more healthy by diminishing its moisture and raising its temperature. One cubic foot of water in the process of evaporation deprives three millions of cubic feet of air of one degree of temperature. An undrained field growing rushes has a permanent temperature from four to six degrees lower than an adjoining field drained and growing wheat. By draining and manuring, by throwing down fences, by removing trees, by clearing underwood, and by promoting the free aëration of the soil, the temperature of large tracts of land in the north of England has been permanently raised three degrees. Thus that very culture of the earth, by which it is made to yield the largest amount of food, increases its salubrity as an abode for man, and lessens at their source the main causes of epidemics.

This increased production has been obtained by a proportionally small addition to labour; for while the quantity of land brought under cultivation, and its produce, have been increasing at a rate of which there is no similar example in any age or country, the relative number of persons employed in agriculture has been as steadily decreasing. As long as the labour of a man applied to the cultivation of the soil is capable of producing only a bare subsistence for himself, there can be no advance in civilization. But when two men can produce subsistence for three, the labour of the third can be set free for the production of surplus articles, which add to the sum of the general convenience, and from that moment the community takes a start in the career of improvement. From a comparison of occupations taken in 1831, it appears that, at that time, the division of labour among the people was such that one person raised nearly all the food of home production consumed by four persons.[18]

Footnote 18:

Porter’s Progress of the Nation, Chap. III.

Were the remaining three idle? Mediately or immediately they were engaged in producing clothing, or fuel, or machinery, economizing the production of both; and busily and well they worked.

In number they exceed one million and a half. Taking into account the accessory occupations, indeed, no fewer than one million two hundred thousand are employed on one single material alone, namely cotton. For these workers, at the beginning of the century, there were imported yearly 56 millions of pounds of cotton: at present the annual importation of it exceeds 550 millions of pounds. These workers in 1820 were assisted in their operations by fourteen thousand power-looms; at present they are assisted by three hundred thousand power-looms, besides twenty-five millions of spindles;[19] while each power-loom, superintended by an adult assisted by a child, completes weekly twenty times the amount of work which the hand-loom is capable of producing. The increase of production is of course enormous, and the effect is a progressive cheapening of the articles manufactured, reducing the price of some of them tenfold, and placing them within the reach of the poorest classes:[20] articles of clothing not only conducive to health through warmth, but almost equally so through cleanliness; for they are almost all composed of such tissues and textures as favour and compel frequent washing.

Footnote 19:

Return to the House of Commons by the Factory Inspectors, of the
Number of Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax, and Silk Factories subject
to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom, page 21.

Footnote 20:

The cheapness of some of these ornamental as well as useful fabrics is
calculated to excite astonishment. A yard of platt net is worth from
20s. to £5; a yard of plain net may be bought for one shilling.

Gigantic strides have been made at the same time in another article of clothing, the basis of which is wool, and of which there were imported in 1801 seven millions of pounds; in 1844, sixty-three millions of pounds. This enormous importation of foreign wool has not only not diminished its home growth, but the increased demand for it has led to a vast multiplication of the animals that yield it, and what is of equal importance, has induced an extraordinary care in improving their breed; so that the very means which have fed the steam-engine have fed the people both with more plentiful and with better food; the steam-engine, meanwhile, applied to these and to all manufacturing processes, being as much a producer of food as the plough.[21]

Footnote 21:

Similar progress has been made in the manufacture of flax and silk as
of cotton and wool.

And the same is emphatically true of fuel, the main creator of all this activity and of its astonishing results; this necessary of life being now brought to the door of every family in three-fold abundance and at one-half the price at which it could have been obtained at the commencement of the century; while such is the demand for it in various manufactures of vast magnitude, that one trade alone, that of iron, consumes annually eight millions of tons—a trade which immediately and powerfully facilitates the production both of food and of clothing. Thus, like one of Nature’s beautiful adaptations, like that wonderful cycle, for example, in which production, change, and reproduction go on in an unvarying circle, the constant and abundant supply of one main necessary of life furnishes the means of producing the others; while these last are the immediate causes of the abundance of the first.

And what a busy hive does this country present at the present time! Out of every thousand males twenty years of age in the kingdom, 836 are directly employed in some active occupation contributing to the national wealth; while the remaining 114 are by no means idle, for they are engaged in some one of the professions.

Though the masses have not yet obtained their due share of the wealth they create, and though there is a class which in relation to one essential condition, to be stated immediately, civilization has scarcely reached, or reached only to injure—with these exceptions, no doubt very important ones—the evidence is indubitable that the entire body of society, from its base to its apex, stands on an elevated table-land which many centuries have been employed in raising and consolidating. I have partly proved this by showing the general diffusion of the means of healthful subsistence and the prolongation of life. I am now to prove it by applying these facts to the subject more especially before us, the decline and disappearance of epidemics.

It is now exactly two centuries, short of ten years, since the visitation of the Great Plague of 1665—that terrible disease which ravaged England for the space of 1249 years: for it is first heard of in English history in the year 430, and the last year in which its name appears in the Bills of Mortality is 1679; that terrible disease which not only maintained undiminished power over this vast space of time, but which sometimes recurred twenty times in one century—that terrible disease is gone. It cannot be supposed that it has worn itself out, for it still frequently returns with its ancient malignity to Constantinople, Alexandria, Smyrna, and other Eastern States.

Petechial or Jail fever, the fatal scourge of the ship, the prison, the hospital, the school, and in short of every place in which any considerable number of persons was assembled, and which when it once broke out was as destructive as the plague—that terrible disease is gone.

Intermittent fever, which in the middle of the fifteenth century and long afterwards recurred like the plague periodically but more frequently, and which often raged as universally, which was sometimes so mortal that the living could hardly bury the dead, and which spared not even the throne, for James I. and Oliver Cromwell both died of ague contracted in London—that formidable disease is gone. Ague, it is true, still exists in the fenny and marshy places which yet remain in England, and we occasionally see a case contracted there in the wards of the London Fever Hospital, but I have not seen a single case of ague contracted in London for upwards of a quarter of a century.

Remittent fever is also gone, scurvy is gone, rickets is gone, malignant sore throat is gone, typhus-gravior is gone, and if small-pox is not gone it is entirely the consequence of our own apathy and folly.

No less remarkable is the gradual decline and the ultimate cessation of certain forms of bowel-complaint of a very painful nature, the very names of which have long disappeared both from medical and popular language. In the 17th century the deaths from two of these diseases alone registered in the Bills of Mortality under two separate titles, were never less than 1000 annually, and in some years they exceeded 4000; but from having been 1070 in the year 1700, they decreased through each successive decade of that century in the following remarkable progression: 770, 706, 350, 150, 110, 80, 70, 40, 20; and they have so entirely disappeared during the 19th century, that, as I have just said, their very names are no longer in use.

Moreover several acute diseases which hardly come under the name of Epidemics, such as Rheumatic Fever, Pneumonia, and Peripneumonia, are much less frequent and fatal now than they were a century ago.

All this time there has been a continually decreasing mortality. In 1700 the estimated mortality of England and Wales was 1 in 39; in 1750 it was 1 in 40; in 1801 it was 1 in 44; in 1810 it was 1 in 49; in 1820 it was 1 in 55, and in 1830 it was 1 in 58.

In London in 1700[22] the deaths were 1 in 25; in 1750, 1 in 21;[23] in 1801, 1 in 35; in 1810, 1 in 38; and in 1830, 1 in 45.

Footnote 22:

parliamentary Returns, 1811.

Footnote 23:

It is conceived that the remarkable increase of the mortality in the
middle of this century was mainly caused by the abuse of spirituous
liquors, which was checked about that time by the imposition of high
duties.—_Sir Gilbert Blane’s Dissertations._

The diminishing number of those who are born merely to die exhibits the decrease of mortality in a still more striking point of view. The estimated mortality of persons under twenty years of age in London in 1780 was 1 in 76; in 1801 it was 1 in 96; in 1830 it was 1 in 124; in 1833 it was 1 in 137; not much more than one-half the proportion who died under twenty half a century ago.

The contrast between the mortality of former times and of the present is seen in the mortality of London in 1685 and in 1830. In the first period the deaths were 1 in 23; in the second they were 1 in 45, little more than one-half. Truly therefore has it been said, that the salubrity of London in the nineteenth century and of London in the seventeenth is far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary season and London in the cholera.

But still we have had Cholera. In less than a quarter of a century we have had three visitations of this dreadful disease, which exhibits the essential characters of a pestilence of the middle ages; and if Typhus-gravior has disappeared, Typhus and its kindred diseases have taken its place; and the Registrar-General constantly presents before our eyes a faithful record of their ravages.

This is too true. We still have epidemics—and why? Because in all our towns there are large portions of the people who live in a state essentially the same as that which existed in the middle ages. The conditions are similar; the results are similar.

It is this unhappy class of people that form the exception to the general progress of the nation to which I have adverted.

These wretched places and their inhabitants do not obtrude themselves on the public eye. They are not seen in our common thoroughfares, nor in our splendid streets and squares. They are not known. The medical man knows them, the minister of religion knows them, the relieving officer knows them, a few dispensers of voluntary charity know them. They are not known to any one else.

Let me then describe one.

It is a small room, say twelve feet square; an inner room; no chimney, no window that will open, no inlet for fresh air, no outlet for foul air. There, on a miserable bed, lies a woman ill of typhus fever; a child at her side on the same bed is dying of that fever; a child already dead of it is stretched out on a table at the bed-side.

I could not breathe the air of that room. I could not remain in it long enough to write a prescription for the poor patients. As I was writing it at the street-door I shivered and felt sick. I knew that I had taken fever. I passed through a very severe form of it. I could take you to hundreds of such houses in every part of London; to hundreds of courts and lanes wholly consisting of such houses.

In such houses, with the conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries, Cholera, in the middle of the 19th, found and exerted a power similar to that which characterized the epidemics of the middle ages, and here Typhus and its kindred diseases continually hold their undisputed reign: houses whose unhealthfulness is increased by the only marks of the age which attach to them, their brick construction and their glass windows; those bricks and windows more effectually than the ancient wattles excluding the external, and confining the internal air, and thereby fostering the generation and spread of typhus. It is remarked by Dr Macculloch, in his account of the Hebrides, that while the inhabitants had no shelter but huts of the most simple construction which afforded free ingress and egress to the air, they were not subject to fevers, but when such habitations were provided as seemed more comfortable and commodious, but which afforded recesses for stagnating air and impurities, then febrile infection was generated. Houses in this state, without ventilation, without the means of cleanliness, worse than the huts of the savage, exist in great numbers in all our towns, and too truly merit the name they have acquired of “fever nests.”

I once took a distinguished statistician of France to some of these places in London, and showed him the sick with typhus lying in their wretched beds; for the sick with typhus may be seen there every day of every year. After the painful inspection he exclaimed—“England is indeed adorned with a splendid mantle, but under it are concealed the greatest horrors.”

Determined that this eminent person should see both sides of the picture, I next took him to the Model Dwellings.

What are the Model Dwellings? Small plots of civilization cultivated in the midst of a wide waste of barbarism.

In what does their civilization consist? In very simple matters.

The subsoil drainage of the site of the building;

The free admission of light and air to each inhabited room;

The abolition of the cess-pool, involving complete house drainage, an
abundant supply of water, and the immediate removal by it of all
refuse which it is capable of holding in suspension;

Means for the removal of house refuse not capable of suspension in
water.

And this is all. And what are the results of these few and simple
arrangements?

That the mortality among the inhabitants of these dwellings is less than
that of London generally, and far less than that of some of the filthy
and neglected localities in London, the Potteries of Kensington for
example; while the mortality among children under ten years of age, on
an average of three years, is one-half less than that of the nation
generally, and four times less than that of the Potteries;