to recognise this principle, and throwing upon
each house-owner the expense of a separate
and costly contract.

And as we have been speaking of plagues
and fevers, let us again urge what we have
very often urged, that the large annual sacrifice
of life by typhus fever and by other
preventable disease, is infinitely more to be
thought about than the mortality by cholera
or any passing epidemic. The mortality by
cholera is terrible, the suddenness with which
friends vanish from our hearths during the
prevalence of such a plague afflicts us deeply,
but it is not through cholera that millions
live in ignorance of perfect health; that of
the children born to us a frightful number
perish in infancy; that every Christmas many
thousands of our countrymen who might
have been alive, and were alive in the
preceding year, lie in the churchyard. This
waste of life is constant. A large number of
people carried off during the great epidemic
are those who would have died during the
succeeding year or two. For this reason
partly, and partly, perhaps, in consequence of
a mysterious law of nature, it seems to be
the case that a year of great mortality by
cholera is followed by an almost proportionate
decrease of mortality in the years following.
The waste of life in our unwholesome
dwellings, and by our unwholesome dealing,
is incomparably more exhausting, even apart
from a consideration of its vast extent.
There, too, nature marvellously works on
man's behalf. Where children die in throngs,
more children are born in throngs. The
woman who has lost fifteen, had she
lost none, might have been mother to no
more than eight. Many who now die in
London, if the whole town had been wholesome,
never would have lived. This principle
of compensation may be necessary for the
proper increase of the human race; but can it
afford any consolation to us that here, in the
midst of a great civilised nation, it is brought
most largely into play? Of how many
sorrows is that mass of needless death the
index! And how much more of weakness and
of social misery can we endure to look at,
when we turn our faces to that other mass of
living sickness which is left to us festering
above the grave?

It is painful to think, that the little people
who come into the world, helplessly dependent
on our care, infants and children under three
years old, are the most constant sufferers
from all social wrong-doing and neglect. In
homes which all the singing in the world
never can make sweet, of each of which it
would be one of the greatest earthly blessings
if it could be said with truth that there was
no other place like it, they suffer and die by
swarms. Of all the children born in this
country, nearly a fourth part die in their
first year. Remember the watchfulness of
nature—that infancy is the beginning of life,
and that, if we all did our whole duty, the
death of an infant would be something
wonderful and startling: and then think how
quietly we bear the fact, that one-fourth of
the people born in England perish before they
are more than one year old! Can there be
found anywhere more dreadful evidence of
the changes that have yet to be wrought in
our homes and habits? Out of the deaths
that occur during a dozen years in England
and Wales, more than a million are those of
infants, and another huge number is made
up by children between one and three years
old. In a recent work on Sudden Deaths,
containing useful information, DR. GRANVILLE
has calculated, from unpublished records, the
mortality caused at Preston by the strike.
The terrible fact comes out that half the
deaths were those of children not yet five years
of age. Surely there is at every hearth somebody
whom children love and constitute their
friend. In every house the children, if they
knew how many of their little commonwealth
are being massacred by filthy and neglected
homes, would plead to their strong friends
and favourites, for help on behalf of their
weak neighbours. There is help in sympathy,
there is help in earnest speech, private or
public; there is help in the expression of
quick wrath against small politicians dallying
with questions about health and life, and
cutting jokes at their expense. There is
help in every act of candid individual inquiry;
there are fifty ways of help in action.

It is not only because they are more
susceptible of the poisons among which they
are born, or because they inherit weaknesses
transmitted by unhealthy or immoral parents,
that the infants die. Infants and young
children, thinly clad, may be seen shivering
about our courts and alleys, even after ten
o'clock, during the cold winter nights, and if
any one inquires why they are not in-doors,
he will find that their parents are absent;
that for fear of accident to the house they
have left neither fire nor candle, and that the
little creatures, who feel always lonely in the
dark, had therefore come out into the court
to make a feint of playing. The parents are
lost to a sense of duty. They shrink from
the filth and misery of their own lodgings.
They cannot drink the water in the rotten
butt that is companion to the cesspool. They
go out for beer, and stay out. When a poor
husband and wife have in this manner been
demoralised and brought to utter wretchedness,
no power on earth can make them fit
heads of a family, till it enables them to
possess a home fit to contain a human household.
Before the renovation that is now to
be effected in the thirteen houses of Wild
Court, shall have been effected throughout
England, we shall all be dead, and all our
children, and perhaps, also, all our grandchildren.
At least, however, it is our privilege
in the existing generation to begin the
doing of this necessary duty. We have but
to be determined. "Mighty are the soul's