This is enough-but it must be kept in mind that these prisoners were the leaders; their followers were probably much younger.

"The experience of the metropolitan police,' continues Mr. Chadwick, is similar as to the comparatively small proportion of force available for public service from such depressed districts. It is corroborative also of the evidence as to the physical deterioration of their population, as well as the disproportion in respect to age. Two out of every three of the candidates for admission to the police force itself are found defective in the physical qualifications. It is rare that any one of the candidates from Spitalfields, Whitechapel, or the districts where the mean duration of life is low, is found to possess the requisite physical qualifications for the force, which is chiefly recruited from the open districts at the outskirts of the town, or from Norfolk and Suffolk, and other agricultural counties.

In general the juvenile delinquents, who come from the inferior districts of the towns, are conspicuously under-size. In a recent examination of juvenile delinquents at Parkhurst by Mr. Kay Shuttleworth, the great majority were found to be deficient in physical organization. An impression is often prevalent that the criminal population consists of persons of the greatest physical strength. Instances of criminals of great strength certainly do occur; but speaking from observation of the adult prisoners from the towns and the convicts in the hulks, they are in general below the average standard of height.'

He follows up these statements by some very curious details collected from the teachers of the pauper children at Norwood and elsewhere :

"The intellects of the children of inferior physical organization are torpid; it is comparatively difficult to gain their attention or to sustain it; it requires much labour to irradiate the countenance with intelligence, and the irradiation is apt to be transient. As a class they are comparatively irritable and bad-tempered. The most experienced and zealous teachers are gladdened by the sight of well-grown healthy children, which presents to them better promise that their labours will be less difficult and more lasting and successful. On one occasion a comparison was made between the progress of two sets of children in Glasgow-the one set taken from the wynds and placed under the care of one of the most skilful and successful infant-school masters; the other a set of children from a more healthy town district, and of a better physical condition, placed under the care of a pupil of the master who had charge of the children from the wynds. After a trial for a sufficient time, the more experienced master acknowledged the comparative inferiority of his pupils, and his inability to keep them up to the pace of the better bodilyconditioned children.'

Our author pithily sums up the result.

Noxious physical agencies, depressing the health and bodily condition of the population, act as obstacles to education and to moral

culture;

culture; in abridging the duration of adult life they check the growth of productive skill, and abridge the amount of social experience and steady moral habits: they substitute for a population that accumulates and preserves instruction, and is steadily progressive, a population young, inexperienced, ignorant, credulous, irritable, passionate, dangerous, having a perpetual tendency to moral as well as physical deterioration.' VI. Evidence of the effects of preventive measures in raising the standard of health and the chances of life.

The results of measures which have lately been introduced into the navy and army, as well as into our prisons, offer indisputable evidence of the health attainable by simple means. Mr. Chadwick declares that no descriptions given by Howard of the worst prisons he visited in England, come up to what appeared in every wynd of Edinburgh and Glasgow inspected by Dr. Arnott and himself. Now on what principle can we defend our not applying to the benefit of the labouring poor, in as far as we can apply them, the measures which we know to have saved so many of our soldiers and sailors-which have therefore saved the nation such vast sums of money? Above all, what is to be said of the judgment of the community that makes prodigious efforts to improve the sanitary condition of its criminals, and apathetically neglects its poor?

After giving us a mass of irresistible evidence as to the actual results of increased care in the case of soldiers and sailors and the inmates of jails, Mr. Chadwick proceeds to compare the expense to owners and tenants of the public drainage, cleansing, and supplies of water necessary for the maintenance of health, with the expense of sickness-the cost of the remedy with the cost of the disease. His tables seem to prove that the cost of the application of his remedies to one-third (1,148,282) of the inhabited houses in England, Wales, and Scotland, would amount to 18,401,2197. The annual instalment for repayment of this debt in thirty years would amount to 613,3741.; the annual interest, commuted at 5 per cent. on the outlay, charged as rent on the tenant, would be 583,6441. Out of this sum, however, the cost of supplying every house with water, even at the highest charge made by the water companies, namely, 138 pailsful for 1d., would, in fact, be a reduction of the existing expenditure of labour in fetching water; and many other similar reductions should be made from the account. But, without lingering over such details, it may be at once stated that the experience of the effect of sanitary measures proves the possibility of the reduction of sickness in the worst districts to at least one-third of the existing amount; and sickness is no trifle in the mere calculation of pounds, shillings, and pence.

'The immediate cost,' says Mr. Chadwick, 'of sickness and loss of employment

employment falls differently in different parts of the country; but on whatsoever fund it does fall, it will be a gain to apply to the means of prevention that fund which is and must needs otherwise continue to be more largely applied to meet the charge of maintenance and remedies. 'Admitting, however, as a fact the misconception intended to be obviated, that the necessary expense of structural arrangements will be an immediate charge instead of an immediate means of relief to the labouring classes;-in proof that they have, in ordinary times, not only the means of defraying increased public rates but increased rents, I refer to the fact that the amount expended in ardent spirits (exclusive of wines), tobacco, snuff, beer, &c., consumed chiefly by them, cannot be much less than from 45,000,000l. to 50,000,000l. per annum in the United Kingdom. By an estimate which I obtained from an eminent spiritmerchant of the cost to the consumer of the British spirits on which duty is paid, the annual expenditure on them alone, chiefly by the labouring classes, cannot be less than 24,000,000l. per annum. cost of one dram per week would nearly defray the expense of the structural arrangements of drainage, &c., by which some of the strongest provocatives to the habit of drunkenness would be removed.'

The

These are most important statements. But still, let it be remembered, the labouring poor in our great towns cannot of themselves, as a class, improve essentially the condition of the localities which they occupy. The workman's location must be governed by his work-therefore the supply of house-room for him becomes almost inevitably a monopoly: he must not only take a lodging near his work, but he must take it as it is: he can neither lay on water, nor cause the removal of filth by drainage-in short, he has no more control over the external economy of his habitation than of the structure of the street in which it exists. But it is demonstrable that, if the employers of labour would but provide better accommodation for their labourers, they would receive in money and in money's worth-to speak of no higher considerations-a fair remuneration for their expenditure.

We everywhere find,' says Mr. Chadwick, (in contradiction to statements frequently made in popular declamations,) that the labourer gains by his connexion with large capital: in the instances presented in the course of this inquiry, of residences held from the employer, we find that the labourer gains by the expenditure for the external appearance of that which is known to be part of the property-an expenditure that is generally accompanied by corresponding internal comforts: he gains by all the surrounding advantages of good roads and drainage, and by more sustained and powerful care to maintain them: he gains by the closer proximity to his work attendant on such an arrangement; and he thus avoids all the attacks of disease occasioned by exposure to wet and cold, and the additional fatigue in traversing long distances to and from his home to the place of work, in the damp of early morning or of nightfall. The exposure to weather after leaving the place of work

2H 2

is

is one prolific cause of disease, especially to the young. When the home is near to the place of work, the labourer is enabled to take his dinner with his family instead of at the beer-shop. The wife and children gain by proximity to the employer's family, in motives to neatness and cleanliness, by their being known and being under observation: as a general rule, the whole economy of the cottages in bye-lanes and outof-the-way places appears to be below those exposed to observation. In connexion with property or large capital, the labourer gains in the stability of employment, and the regularity of income incidental to operations on a large scale: there is a mutual benefit also in the wages for service being given in the shape of buildings or permanent and assured comforts; that is, in what would be the best application of wages, rather than wholly in money wages.'

We must refer to the Report itself for a long array of most pleasing examples of the practical truth of these statements. Not a few of the great master-manufacturers acknowledged to Mr. Chadwick that what they had done from motives of humanity had turned out, to their agreeable surprise, immensely advantageous to their own purses. But let us content ourselves with what is stated as to one particular source of evil, and the facility of cutting it off by a judicious employer. The example is from Leeds :

The effects,' says Mr. Fairburn, produced by payment at the public-house are to oblige the workman to drink. He is kept waiting in the public-house during a long time, varying from two to three hours, sometimes as much as five hours. The workman cannot remain in the house without drinking, even if he were alone, as he must make some return to the landlord for the use of the room. But the payment of a number of men occupies time in proportion to their numbers. We find that to pay our own men in the most rapid way requires from two to three hours. The assembled workmen, of course, stimulate each other to drink. Out of a hundred men, all of whom will, probably, have taken their quart of porter or ale, above a third will go home in a state of drunkenness of drunkenness to the extent of imbecility. The evil is not confined to the men; the destructive habit is propagated in their families. At cach public-house a proportion of the poor women, their wives, attend. According to my own observation, full ten per cent. of the men have their wives and children in attendance at the publichouse. The poor women have no other mode of getting money to market with on the Saturday night than attending at the public-house to get it from their husbands. They may have children whom they cannot leave at home, and these they bring with them. The wives are thus led to drink, and they and their children are made partakers of the scenes of drunkenness and riot; for there are not unfrequently quarrels leading to fights between the workmen when intoxicated.

It is only the inferior shopkeepers or hucksters who will sell on the Sunday morning, and they sell an inferior commodity at a higher price. Then the Sunday morning is thus occupied: the husband, and some

times the wife, is kept in a state of feverish excitement by the previous night's debauch; they are kept in a state of filth and disorder; even the face is unwashed; no clean clothes are put on; and there is no church attendance, and no decency. Indeed, by the pressure of the wants created by habits of drinking, there is soon no means to purchase clean or respectable clothes, and lastly no desire to purchase them. The man, instead of cleaning himself, and appearing at church on the Sunday, or walking out with his family on the Sunday afternoon in a respectable condition, remains at home in filth, and in a filthy hovel.

The workman who has been absent from drunkenness comes to his work pale, emaciated, shattered, and unnerved. From my own observation in my own branch of manufacture, I should say that the quantity and quality of the work executed during the first day or so would be about one-fifth less than that obtainable from a steady and attentive workman. Another consideration for the master is the fact that such workmen, the most idle and dissolute, are the most discontented, and are always the foremost in mischievous strikes and combinations.'

Now what is Mr. Fairburn's prescription for these disorders? He sends a clerk into each room in his manufactory immediately after dinner-hour on Saturday to pay each man individually, who, by this simple arrangement, is not taken from his work half a minute. The master thus saves on an average an hour and a half's labour of 550 men, which amounts to 800 hours of labour per week; one great cause of non-attendance at church on the Sunday is abolished; and, lastly, not above four or five of his people arrive late at their work on Monday morning.

Let us turn for a moment to the rural regions. Out of many of Mr. Chadwick's witnesses, let us attend to one:-Charles Higgins, Esq., Chairman of the Bedford Union, thus describes the advantages which have arisen from an improved description of cottages in his vicinity:

'The man sees his wife and family more comfortable than formerly; he has a better cottage and garden; he is stimulated to industry, and, as he rises in respectability of station, he becomes aware that he has a character to lose. Thus an important point is gained. Having acquired certain advantages, he is anxious to retain and improve them; he strives more to preserve his independence, and becomes a member of benefit, medical, and clothing societies; and frequently, besides this, lays up a certain sum, quarterly or half-yearly, in the savings-bank. Almost always attendant upon these advantages, we find the man sending his children to be regularly instructed in a Sunday, and, where possible, in a day school, and himself and family more constant in their attendance at some place of worship on the Lord's-day.

A man who comes home to a poor, comfortless hovel after his day's labour, and sees all miserable around him, has his spirits more often depressed than excited by it. He feels that, do his best, he shall be miserable still, and is too apt to fly for a temporary refuge to the ale

house