Thk Increase of Town Populations, S^ 



nourishing food be easier to procure? Will the tempta- 

 tion to drink become less? Such perhaps are questions 

 more for the legislator than the public health worker still 

 there can be no line of demarcation between these social 

 reformers over the drink question. It is however much 

 to be regretted, as regards these two workers for the 

 public good, that they are not keeping pace together. 

 Sanitary reform is certainly going faster than social 

 reform ; the former is galloping whilst the latter crawls ! 

 And whilst this continues it is impossible but that pre- 

 ventive medicine in the great good it attempts must be 

 thwarted very much by its limping brother. The immense 

 good the former does and the vast blessmgs it confers 

 on all classes are to a certain extent negatived by a force 

 of circumstances over which it has no control. The 

 onus of the sorrow and sin occasioned by such competi- 

 tion as we have referred to cannot properly be laid at its 

 door. In referring to infant life assurance a recent number 

 of the Contemporary Review (July i8go) had the following 

 from one of its contributors, when relating the moral 

 degradation of some of the poor parents of these poorer 

 children, " they have no patience with the slow ways of 

 death; they know the poor mother's friends, syrups and 

 rat powder and biscuits. In all death-ways they are 

 clever." A temperate and just critic of that assertion 

 might ask, have they not been made so ? What other 

 door is being held so wide open for them? But this 

 is not the point, and it becomes more pra6lical for us to 

 consider whether these evils will become less as the 

 people become more? A galloping increase in popu- 

 lation and a hesitating limping condition of social 

 reform ! The State must realize the fa6l that there 



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