364 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



may possess. The markets they open up stimulate improvements in 

 agricultural methods, and the industries and commerce they establish 

 conduce to good government and individual liberty. They are the 

 nurseries of the arts and sciences, and as to the evils attending them, 

 on which I have been enlarging, they are not all inherent in their very 

 nature, but are largely accidental concomitants of their mode of growth 

 and the offspring of the ignorance and stupidity of their inhabitants. 

 Many of these are in process of mitigation and I dare say it occurs to 

 you that if you had a free hand in demolishing and reconstructing one 

 of our great cities with, say, the cost of the South African war at your 

 disposal, you could free it from much of the opprobrium in relation 

 to sanitary matters that has hitherto attached to it. But such whole- 

 sale remodeling is scarcely practicable, and even were it accomplished, 

 the city would still probably fall short of the country standard of health, 

 even if that standard remained where it is at present and were not 

 raised like that of the city. For as things now are, the country is in 

 many parts guilty of sanitary offences as heinous as those of the towns, 

 and is only saved from their consequences in an equal ratio by the 

 wider elbow-room it affords, and the fresh air and unpolluted sunshine 

 it enjoys by nature's bounty. The last royal commission that reported 

 on rural housings described the conditions under which many agricul- 

 tural laborers live as ' physically and morally unwholesome and offen- 

 sive.' A London association that in 1897 conducted a systematic in- 

 quiry into the state of 240 country villages with 10,000 dwellings 

 declared that in one half of these villages the cottages were bad, and 

 that in some thirty villages there were cases of gross overcrowding. 

 Mr. Walter Crotch has stated that the result of his own very extensive 

 and searching investigation had been " the discovery of whole villages 

 without a drop of water from end to end; of cottages without even the 

 ordinary conveniences which the law of common decency demands, 

 and of poor people having their homes let while they lay quivering in 

 the throes of death." " Week by week," he goes on, " the most shock- 

 ing cases of overcrowding are reported in the newspapers, and there can 

 be no doubt that this huddling together of people of both sexes and of 

 all ages in the same room is a source of frightful immorality." 



Mr. Clement Edwards said in 1900 that many of the inhabited cot- 

 tages in the south and west of England were in a hopelessly dilapidated 

 condition with gaping walls and rotting roofs, and were, moreover, 

 terribly overcrowded. Some of the facts he reported were positively 

 revolting in themselves and much worse in their suggestions of in- 

 evitable social and moral results. As to sanitation it was non-existent. 

 Miss Constance Cochrane, of the Sanitary Institute, quotes a case in 

 Cambridgeshire, in which eleven members of one family were all sleep- 

 ing in one room owing to the scarcity of cottages in the village. Private 



