340 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. xix. 



governed communities. That the latter, at all events, 

 is almost chronic in India, a country with an industrious 

 people and a fertile soil, is the direct result of governing 

 in the interests of the ruling classes instead of making 

 the interests of the governed the first and the only 

 object. But in this respect India is no worse off than 

 our own country. The condition of the bulk of our 

 workers, the shortness of their lives, the mortality among 

 their children, and the awful condition of misery and 



and corridors were kept clean, the darkness, the want of ventilation, 

 and the overcrowding would be sources of deadly disease. With 

 the superadded filth inside and out and the tropical climate, the 

 absence, rather than the presence, of plague would seem the more 

 extraordinary phenomenon, since the condition of London in the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could hardly have been so bad. 

 The same Parliamentary Paper (up to March, 1897) contains a Sani- 

 tary Inspection Report on Calcutta, which goes much more into 

 detail, and describes a state of things of the most terrible and almost 

 incredible nature. As examples six men and boys lived and cooked 

 in a room 7X7X6 feet, which had no window, and with filth and 

 sewage all around. Of another street we read: "The houses are 

 built almost back to back. It would be nearly impossible to squeeze 

 between them; sunlight is so far shut out that, with broad daylight 

 outside the gully, it is absolutely impossible to do more than grope 

 your way within these tenements; rats run about here in the dark as 

 they would at night; a heavy, sickening odor pervades the whole 

 place; walls and floors are alike damp with contamination from 

 liquid sewage, which lies rotting and for which there is no escape." 

 There are eight foolscap pages of this Report, going into even more 

 horrible details; and there can be no doubt that a large portion of it 

 will apply just as well to Bombay as to Calcutta, and thus enable us 

 to realize more fully the condition of the many hundred thousand 

 dwellers in the worst parts of that plague-stricken city. In the discus- 

 sion that followed the reading of Mr. Birdwood's paper at the Society 

 of Arts, Dr. Simpson, late Health Officer in Calcutta who had been 

 in Bombay assisting the search parties in the plague-stricken dis- 

 trictsstated that, " bad as the houses were in some parts of Cal- 

 cutta, he found them immensely worse at Bombay." On the other 

 hand, Mr. Acworth, late Municipal Commissioner of Bombay, said 



