58 National Health. 



Registrar-General, the district of London, with its high birth- 

 rate and low death-rate, was a most remarkably healthy city ; 

 yet what was the fact ? The most careful investigation could 

 hardly find a person except a few diseased children among the 

 working classes in London whose parents and grand-parents had 

 been born in London ; that meant London killed off its working- 

 class population in three or four generations, and was being 

 continually recruited by healthy immigrants from the rural 

 districts. No matter how favourable the figures, such a city 

 was not a healthy place for the working-class to live in. What 

 was wanted was the Registrar-General to publish a health-rate 

 showing the percentage of healthy and diseased people in the 

 population, then the public could judge at a glance the true 

 state of the national health. Had Gieat Britain 75 per cent, of 

 it§ people healthy ? had she 50 per cent, healthy ? or had she 

 only 25 per cent, of really healthy people in her population ? 

 On the answer to this question depended the whole future of 

 the nation. If every century the percentage of diseased and 

 degraded humanity was steadily diminishing, and the percentage 

 of strong, healthy, and energetic people steadily increasing, then 

 the life of the nation was assured and the future was full of 

 hope and promise. The lecturer then took a hasty glance at 

 the prejudicial effects which civilization had exercised on Grecian 

 and Roman national life, and afterwards, referring to the case of 

 the Jews, said that the method by which Moses solved the 

 problem of restoring the national health of a diseased, degraded, 

 and miserable people was masterful in its very simplicity, and 

 consisted in compelling those people to live for forty years in 

 conformity with the highest sanitary laws, and the general scope 

 of those laws might be briefly described, making all necessary 

 allowance for difference in the name and classification of diseases. 

 The entire people were rescued from the contamination of 

 civilization and the impure life of large cities, and removed to 

 the solitudes of the desert and the fine bracing air of the 

 mountains. Cleanliness of every kind was most rigorously 

 enforced in a manner impossible in modern times. Food and 



