1866.] CARPENTER — ON VITAL STATISTICS. 155 



the Mersey, with its cul-de-sac courts and tide-backed sewers ; while 

 round the sands of Morecambe Bay (within a fraction) only one 

 of the coffins contains an infant of days to three which are laid 

 within the bosom of our mountain forests, because the city rulers, 

 and the owners and occupiers of their dwellings, denied them the 

 right to breathe, even for one short year, the pure air that nature 

 is for ever wafting to our otherwise favoured city. 



It was well said, in the Sanitary Keport presented to the imperial 

 parliament in 1858, pp. xxvii. that " 1. The lives of young 

 children, as compared with the more hardened and acclimatized 

 lives of the adult population, furnish a very sensitive test of sanitary 

 circumstances , so that differences in the infantine death-rates, are, 

 under certain qualifications, the hest proof of differences of house- 

 hold condition in any number of compared districts. 2. Those 

 places where infants are most apt to die, are necessarily the places 

 where survivors are most apt to be sickly ; and where, if they 

 struggle through a scrofulous childhood to realize an abortive 

 puberty, they beget a sicklier brood than themselves. A high local 

 mortality of children must almost necessarily denote a high local 

 prevalence of those causes which determine a d<g< iteration of race." 

 These words are prompted by long experience, built on facts which 

 cannot be gainsaid. If they are true of all high rates of infantile 

 mortality, how awful must be their truth in this city where the rate 

 is the highest yet presented! And if the number of graves in our 

 cemeteries prove these things to be true on the average of the whole 

 city, what must be the harvest of death if we subtract the popu- 

 lation living on the healthy mountain-side, and mark the coffins 

 from the houses in Griffintown ! Surely a fearful responsibility 

 rests on the members of the City Council, and especially on the 

 members of the Health and Road Committees, as well as on all 

 owners of property and householders in the city. Has any man a 

 right to draw money from the rents of houses, by living in which 

 children cannot but be killed ] Has the Council a right to compel 

 owners and tenants to cleanse their premises, while it leaves the 

 streets, over which it assumes the entire control, unsewered and even 

 reeking with the surface filth of years?* 



* Instances were recorded by the Sanitary Association, of women 

 who were compelled last summer to open their windows over the 

 reeking fumes of the back courts, because they could not bear the still 

 greater stenches of the street. 



