2O Human Physiology. 



prepared to prove by credible witnesses before a committee 

 of the House of Commons, that in the united parishes of 

 St. George, Bloomsbury, and St. Giles, for which I am rated, 

 there is not one instance, in living memory, of an infant sur- 

 viving the treatment in this workhouse. There are now in 

 this workhouse between 80 and 90 infants ; and, according to 

 all experience, not one of these will be living this time next year. 

 One wretched pauper woman has the charge of all the poor 

 victims of this brutal system. Their food is the coarse work-- 

 house bread, soaked in boiling water, tinged with what is 

 called milk. With this, as they lie in rows, they are stuffed 

 till they die, as, of course, they very soon do ; or very soon 

 there would be no room to lay them out in. They are coming 

 in every hour of the day and night, and as they come so they 

 go. Nobody knows nobody cares." 



Mr. Chadwick, one of a deputation from the Metropolitan 

 Association of Officers of Health to Lord Palmerston, to 

 whom they went to tell their experiences of the state of dirt 

 and disease in which they found children in the public 

 schools, stated his belief that, out of about sixty thousand 

 children who died annually in England and Wales, within the 

 school ages, as many as fifty thousand might be saved ! 



Lord Palmerston told the deputation that in respect to pure 

 air and pure water he was a converted man ; but since that 

 time, though the nation has spent many millions on army, 

 navy, useless officers of state, and wars that might have been 

 avoided, little has been done to save the lives of the fifty 

 thousand school children who every year needlessly perish. 



That vast numbers perish who might be saved, is proved by 

 such a return as the following : 



In the Gray's Inn district of London of 100 deaths of all 

 ages in the best houses, 29 were children under 5 years; in 

 the worst houses, 55 under 5 years. 



In Preston, of 100 deaths in each of the classes of gentry. 



