178 Value of Human Life in Canada. 



But it is not fair to leave out the cholera year from the average. 

 The same poisonous gases which yearly raise the mortality from 

 14 to 34 or even 38 per 1,000, occasionally concentrate their en- 

 ergies for the development of a cholera, a ship-fever or some other 

 pestilence. Such visitations are often looked upon as "special 

 providences;" but they are as natural and necessary results of 

 culpable neglect in sanitary matters, as is delirium tremens of 

 continued intoxication, or ship scurvy of unwholesome diet. 

 The people of Montreal must continue to lodge such visitants so long 

 as they make homes for them in putrid emanations ; and they 

 would be deprived of what is justly their own if these pestilences 

 were excluded, as much as if the key were turned in their market 

 of Bonsecours or in the parish church of Notre Dame. The fire did 

 not add to the mortality of the city ; it consumed the fever-beds 

 as well as the dwellings, and drove the people into the shelter of 

 the fresh air. But the cholera found a congenial atmosphere in 

 the swamps of Griffintown ; it not only devoured the yearly increase 

 of the city, but killed off 463 persons over and above as many as were 

 born that year ; so that for each thousand of the 60,000 inhabi- 

 tants of the city, sixty-two human beings perished. The grave that 

 year hastily swallowed up 3,739 living souls. The worst recorded 

 pestilence in England during the present generation was the 

 Famine-Fever year of 1848, in Warrington. In that year one out 

 of every 20 inhabitants died ; in the Montreal Cholera of 1854, 

 out of every fifteen citizens one was found dead ! A widow said 

 of the first visitation of the dreaded Asiatic pestilence in Bristol, 

 that it was a " blessed cholera ;" and she spoke truly, for it was 

 the cause of the Sanitary Reform movement, which has saved its 

 myriads of lives and will save its millions more. The fever in 

 Warrington led to the immediate cleansing of its filth ; and its 

 inhabitants are now yearly taxing themselves large sums for in- 

 vestment in the underground life insurance. The people of Mon- 

 treal have to this day retained their unenviable distinction as the 

 dwellers in the city of wealth and death ; and even last year their 

 Council not only refused to lay the dust of the city, but could not 

 draw water enough from the mighty river to allow the inhabitants 

 to do it at their own expense ! 



density of London, and consisted in great measure of the dirtiest and poor- 

 est of the Irish race. Such was Liverpool in 1841 ; and more unhealthy 

 even than this has been Montreal from 1853 to the present time ; although 

 for five months in every year its laboratories of pestilence lie harmless 

 in the safe prisons of the ice and snow 1 



