192 



AMERICAN JOURNEY. 



[Chap. V. 



it was new ground to them. [He] showed up their great dis- 

 tillery,* which devours two whole farms per day." 



His chief work at Montreal was his effort to rouse the 

 inhabitants to sanitary reform. He was horror-struck with the 

 abominations which the thaw revealed ; and personally ex- 

 plored places "where the frame houses positively stood on 

 liquid little better than from a sewer, with undrained, unpaved 

 back-yards, into which were melted down the accumulated filth 

 of the winter. During five months the stinks are frozen up, 

 like the tunes in Munchausen's horn ; but when the thaw comes, 

 instead of beautiful tunes thawing out, it is a flow of stench- 

 making nastiness, of which only a part drains away, and 

 another part is carted away, leaving a large portion ready to be 

 changed into the fevers, etc., of summer. And here, in this 

 glorious city, on the island between two grand rivers, with its 

 Royal Mount, its splendid stone, and its great wealth, you see 

 the streets in some places with a foot or more of unmelted 

 ice and snow, others in squash, while the majority are with 

 I cannot tell how many inches of the finest dust, which is in 

 itself the precipitation of the winter stinks upon the dust atoms 

 as the snow melts ; and even in the calmest days it spoils your 

 clothes, gets everywhere (to an extent that English dust bears 

 no comparison), and you breathe it with its seeds of disease 

 into your lungs, and even the double windows will not shut it 

 out of the houses. And the Corporation, pleading poverty, not 

 only will not water the streets ; but, last year, actually refused 

 to allow the inhabitants to tax themselves and supply them 

 with water, though they have an unlimited supply, only for the 

 trouble of pumping, which the Lachine rapids do. . . . The 

 worst places in Warrington in 1846-47 were not so bad as some 

 I went to here." 



His first lecture on Sanitary Reform was on Good Friday : 



* Philip wrote : 1 ' Close to the distillery is a great college endowed by 

 him [the distiller] ; and in front of this, the church, on which is inscribed, 



* St. Thomas Church : erected A.D. 1841, by Thomas at his sole 



expense' [some read it 'at his soul's expense'];' on the other side, a 

 little lower down, is the jail. The church is to me the more frightful object 

 of the two ! " 



