The supply of water is of course one of the chief means for the purification of a town. It is at present, I fear, grievously neglected throughout the country. The Sanitary Report draws attention to the mode of supplying water to Bath, and gas to Manchester: and adduces the latter as an instance “of the practicability of obtaining supplies for the common benefit of a town without the agency of private companies.” And Mr. Chadwick, after a lengthened investigation into the subject which will well repay perusal, thus concludes:
“I venture to add, as the expression of an opinion founded on communications from all parts of the kingdom, that as a highly important sanitary measure connected with any general building regulations, whether for villages or for any class of towns, arrangements should be made for all houses to be supplied with good water, and should be prescribed as being as essential to cleanliness and health as the possession of a roof or of due space; that for this purpose, and in places where the supplies are not at present satisfactory, power should be vested in the most eligible local administrative body, which will generally be found to be that having charge of cleansing and structural arrangements, to procure proper supplies for the cleansing of the streets, for sewerage, for protection against fires, as well as for domestic use.”
It is possible that some of my readers may think that the wretched state of ventilation, drainage, and building, which I have been commenting upon, is mainly to be accounted for by poverty. It belongs, they may say, to an old country; it is the long accumulated neglect of ages; it embodies the many vicissitudes of trade which Great Britain has felt; it is a thing which the people would remedy for themselves, if you could only give them more employment and better wages. In answer to this I will refer to an authority quoted by Mr. Chadwick in his Essay on the “Pressure and Progress of the Causes of Mortality,” read before the Statistical Society in 1843.
“In abundance of employment, in high wages, and the chief circumstances commonly reputed as elements of prosperity of the labouring classes, the city of New York is deemed pre-eminent. I have been favoured with a copy of ‘_The Annual Report of the Interments in the City and County of New York for the Year_ 1842,’ presented to the Common Council by Dr. John Griscom, the city inspector, in which it may be seen how little those circumstances have hitherto preserved large masses of people from physical depression. He has stepped out of the routine to examine on the spot the circumstances attendant on the mortality which the figures represent. He finds that upwards of 33,000 of the population of that city live in cellars, courts, and alleys, of which 6618 are dwellers in cellars. ‘Many,’ he states, ‘of these back places are so constructed as to cut off all circulation of air, the line of houses being across the entrance, forming a _cul de sac_, while those in which the line is parallel with, and at one side of the entrance, are rather more favourably situated, but still excluded from any general visitation of air in currents. As to the influence of these localities upon the health and lives of the inmates, there is, and can be, no dispute; but few are aware of the dreadful extent of the disease and suffering to be found in them. In the damp, dark, and chilly cellars, fevers, rheumatism, contagious and inflammatory disorders, affections of the lungs, skin, and eyes, and numerous others, are rife, and too often successfully combat the skill of the physician and the benevolence of strangers.