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the exercise of human judgment, and that we may leave the future 

 to take care of itself, as our fathers did 1 We are by no means jus- 

 tified in adopting such a conclusion, for, if we can not yet trace 

 wholly to their causes, all the advantages we possess over our pre- 

 decessors, we are able to reach the conviction, beyond all' reasonable 

 doubt, that at least, the larger share of the immunity from the visits 

 of the plague and other forms of pestilence, and from sweeping fires, 

 and the larger part of the improved general health and increased 

 length of life which civilized towns have lately enjoyed is due to the 

 abandonment of the old-fashioned compact way of building towns, 

 and the gradual adoption of a custom of laying them out with much 

 larger spaces open to the sun-light and fresh air ; a custom the 

 introduction of which was due to no intelligent anticipation of such 

 results. 



Evidence of this is found in the fact that the differing propor- 

 tions between the dying and the living, the sick and the well, which 

 are found to exist between towns where most of the people still live 

 on narrow streets, and those in which the later fashions have been 

 generally adopted ; and between parts of the same town which are 

 most crowded and those which are more open, are to this day nearly 

 as great as between modern and ancient towns. For instance, in 

 Liverpool, the constant influx of new-comers of a very poor and 

 ignorant class from the other side of the Irish Channel, and the con- 

 sequent demand for house-room, and the resulting value of the poor, 

 old buildings which line the narrow streets, has, till recently, caused 

 the progress of improvement to be much slower than in the much 

 larger town of London, so that, while the average population of 

 Liverpool is about 140,000 to the square mile, that of London is but 

 50,000 ; the average age at death in Liverpool is seventeen, and that 

 in London twenty-six. In the city of Brooklyn the number of deaths 

 for each thousand of population that occurred this last year in the 

 closer built parts, was twice as large as in those where the streets 

 are wider and there are many gardens. 



Comparisons of this kind have been made in such number, and 

 the data for them have been drawn from such a large variety of 

 localities in which the conditions of health in all other respects have 

 been different, that no man charged, however temporarily and under 

 whatever limitations, with municipal responsibilities, can be par- 

 doned for ignoring the fact that the most serious drawback to the 

 prosperity of town communities has always been dependent on con- 

 ditions (quite unnecessary to exist in the present day) which have i 

 led to stagnation of air and excessive deprivation of sun-light. 



