ii8 The Essentials of House Sanitation — 



It is a national disgrace that the great majority of our 

 National Schools are unprovided with yards or offices of any 

 kind ; and, where they are provided, they are most commonly 

 of the very rudest description — filthy, dark, and small, — unless 

 in vested schools, built under Crown grants, of which there are 

 too few. No wonder that the children of our working classes 

 are brought up with degraded notions of personal decency, or 

 the value of cleanly habits ; and that when they come to be heads 

 of families, or servants in private houses, they think so little 

 about their sanitary surroundings, or the duty that devolves 

 upon them to aid the public authorities in providing for their 

 health, comfort, and happiness. The value of improved artisans' 

 dwellings properly cared for, has been proved to have the best 

 results on the health of the places where they are provided. 



The improvement made in artisans' dwellings, in London and 

 elsewhere, has helped very materially to reduce the death-rate. 

 In 1 88 1, when the city death-rate was 21 '2 per 1,000, the death- 

 rate in the workers' dwellings erected by the Peabody Trust 

 was 17*2. The rate in the buildings of the London Improved 

 Industrial Dwellings Company was i6"4 ; and in the dwellings 

 of the Metropolitan Association, 14-3. In Newcastle, when the 

 death-rate was 22*2 per 1,000, the rate in the improved indus- 

 trial dweUings was only 12 per 1,000. Such buildings can be 

 provided under the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890, 

 under the provisions of which any individual or company can 

 obtain financial aid from the Government, for the purpose of 

 facilitating the erection of suitable dwellings. 



It would be a very serious mistake to think that the dwelhngs 

 of " the better classes " are " better " than the dwellings of the 

 working classes from a sanitary point of view. Not at all. 

 In many, very many of our superior dwellings, in which all is 

 bright with tinsel and varnish, there are as defective sanitary 

 arrangements as elsewhere, and it is as incumbent upon the 

 tenants of such houses to see to their sanitary surroundings as 

 in any dwellings of the poor ; and yet such tenants are as 

 apathetic as their poorer brethren in looking to the sanitary 



