124 J. H. CARDEW. 
death rate is reduced, but sooner or later, owing to the 
saturation of the soil by fouled water and the presence in 
the public streets and gutters of liquid filth discharged 
from bath rooms, lavatories, wash houses and stables, the 
death rate commences to increase, and it has then been 
known to reach a higher figure than before the advent of 
the water supply, a fact that has been specially noted in 
the suburbs around Sydney. See death rate and water 
supply curve for Sydney period ending 1885 and Melbourne 
ending 1889. 
The principal object of all sanitary services should be 
not only the provision of comforts and conveniences to the 
public but the reduction of the death rate and its con- 
comitant sickness, the accomplishment of which, in itself 
alone, is a very fair measure of the prosperity and well 
being of the people: the saving of the adult lives from 
premature death means a saving of money, and aS many 
eminent medical men have proved that for every death 
that occurs there are from 20 to 30 cases of sickness, all 
involving loss of money and dislocation of business, the 
aggregate gain due toa reduced death rate in a large 
community is enormous. So that as regards benefits, the 
first and greatest is the reduction of the death rate, and in 
fact it may be said that the accomplishment of this great 
object is the achievement more or less directly or indirectly 
of all the other benefits that follow. 
In order to understand fully the great blessing conferred 
by sanitary works in large cities it is only necessary to 
take a retrospective view of the state of affairs in the City 
of London in bygone days. History tells us that in the year | 
1290 the accumulation of filth in all the water courses 
traversing the city was appalling, and the exhalations 
from the Fleet Ditch, as it was called, a creek draining 
about 400 acres, impregnated the air of the district with 
