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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



great extent vertically upward to him from the 

 ground ; water comes vertically downward to him 

 from the sky. His clothing, whether of wool, or 

 flax, or skin, grows on the spot ; his house is 

 built from a quarry in his field, or from logs in 

 his own bit of forest ; the refuse from his house 

 and person is buried in the soil, and so on. Con- 

 trast all this with the horizontality, so to speak, 

 of town arrangements. Water is brought from 

 reservoirs twenty or fifty miles away ; food comes 

 from farms miles distant, perhaps from the other 

 side of the Atlantic, or from the other side of the 

 Pacific ; clothing from any part of Europe or 

 Asia. As for refuse substances, no vertical re- 

 moval of them is possible ; complicated labyrinths 

 of tunnels, arterial systems, pumping-stations, 

 sewage irrigations, acts of Parliament, and what 

 not, have to be instituted to prevent us from 

 poisoning one another. Think again of all the 

 horizoutality implied in highways, railroads, and 

 telegraphs. 



I would not strain my geometrical metaphor 

 further than it will bear. Dwell on one more as- 

 pect of the same subject. Think how much his- 

 torical phenomena have to do with the matter. 

 For good or for evil, for good infinitely more than 

 for evil, but yet for evil also, we have to bear the 

 burden of the past. The treasures are mixed 

 with dross. Take the single instance of house- 

 provision. A squatter in the bush can build his 

 house where he likes, he has hill and vale to 

 choose from ; but a house commonly lasts longer 

 than a man, and in towns we have to choose from 

 the houses provided by other generations. ( Put 

 yourself in the position of a workman who must 

 live near his work, say within a mile of where we 

 arc now. Think of the structure of London be- 

 tween Regent Street and the Tower — I speak of 

 the courts, back streets, and lanes, which I would 

 advise you to walk through this evening or to- 

 morrow, they are much more interesting than the 

 lanes of Venice — and then ask the question, 

 How much of all this is due to the intolerably 

 bad domestic government of England from the 

 restoration of the Stuarts down to, let us say, the 

 reign of Dr. Chadwick, thirty to forty years ago? 

 Think how it would have been if London, after 

 the Fire, could have been rebuilt under the eye 

 of Cromwell, instead of the unholy brood who 

 for a whole generation threw England to the dogs, 

 and whose mere names, were it possible, we would 

 forget! Then follow the growth of London into 

 the next century by the light of Hogarth's pict- 

 ures — take the one picture of Cruelty, for in- 

 stance — and think how very little forethought 



might have changed the growth of St. Giles's, 

 Bloomsbury, or St. Anne's, Soho. And then, when 

 by reading, and also by ocular inspection, you 

 have become familiar with the anatomy and phys- 

 iology of a London court, including the Embryol- 

 ogy of it. that is, the way in which it arises, un- 

 der the motive power of high rents, by the sim- 

 ple process of building rows of small houses at 

 the end, and ultimately at the sides, of back gar- 

 dens, the wind from each one of the four quar- 

 ters of the sky hermetically shut out, and the 

 ignorant greed of the builder unintcrfered with by 

 wisdom or by policemen of any sort or kind ; 

 then, I say, when the lesson has been well 

 learned, go to Hackney, or to Stratford, where 

 new London is ravaging the green fields rapidly, 

 and ask how far is the next generation to be com- 

 promised by what the speculative builders arc 

 doing there at this moment, and compare the rate 

 of velocity of their proceedings with that of Sir 

 Sidney Waterlow's most admirable building so- 

 ciety or of the Peabody trustees. 



But since we have thus ventured on histori- 

 cal ground, let us follow on a little farther. Why 

 is it that we have been obliged to pay such atten- 

 tion to public health in England ? We have 

 taken the lead, it is admitted, in this matter ; is 

 this solely and entirely owing to our superior 

 wisdom and morality, or are there ether rea- 

 sons ? 



I suppose the facts calling for sanitary inter- 

 ference in this country may be condensed into 

 two : the fact that half the nation is living in 

 large towns, and the fact that milk and pure 

 water are unattainable in country villages. I 

 cannot touch on this latter point ; but I think 

 you will find it connected with the disappearance 

 of the numerous freeholds of between twenty and 

 fifty acres that existed till a century ago. But it 

 is worth while to dwell for a moment on the first, 

 because, next to the Norman conquest and the 

 Puritan Revolution, it is certainly the most im- 

 portant event, or set of events, in English his- 

 tory. Tou are aware, of course, that it is an en- 

 tirely modern fact. Till almost eighty years ago 

 the growth of towns in England had gone on with 

 steady, quiet progress, from the time of the Tu- 

 dors downward. Then began the most stupen- 

 dous torrent of bricks and mortar that the world 

 has ever seen. In 1801, London — I mean the 

 whole area of the Metropolitan Board of Works — 

 had about 900,000 people. It now has four times 

 that number. Manchester, Glasgow, Birming- 

 ham, and Liverpool, were all much below 100,000. 

 They now exceed or approach the half-million. 



