1 859.] MORTALITY IN MONTREAL. 



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"a little against the grain; but the people here don't care. 

 To the Catholics, it is not a fete oV obligation ; and many of 

 them were working at their trades : it is only the Episcopalians 

 that keep it. I enlightened their minds by facts and figures in 

 general : and promised Montreal in particular the next lecture." 

 For this he prepared by making himself acquainted with the 

 state of the city, and copying hosts of figures from the 

 protonotary's office, and hunting up statistics in the city offices, 

 etc. He spared no pains in analyzing the census returns, and 

 making the necessary calculations. He found that the residents 

 had never ascertained their rate of mortality, nor examined 

 into its causes. Fortunately he had procured from home his 

 sanitary notes and papers. He wrote, " Of course I dreaded 

 the lecture — a stranger not liking to inveigh against the place, 

 and make known their deaths and horrors. However, the thing 

 was clear, and I went through it in a calm, orderly manner, to 

 the great astonishment of the people. At any rate, it is pleasant 

 to feel that if the U. S. people do not want me to lift up my 

 voice among them, my visit has not been altogether useless ; 

 but that here, where first on this continent I broke silence, the 

 seed sown may be the means of saving thousands of lives, and 

 preventing the sickness that those good Christian ladies are 

 endeavouring to cure : and it may be that seeds of temperance 

 truth and of Christian truth may find entrance into some con- 

 genial souls, so that I am not obliged altogether to hear the voice 

 — 'What doest thou here, Elijah ! J " He found the newspapers 

 ready to admit full reports of his lectures, and his statistical 

 tables \ and a fortnight later, when he was in Boston, he com- 

 posed with very great care a paper " On the Relative Value of 

 Human Life in Different Parts of Canada," which was first 

 printed in "The Canadian Naturalist" (16 pp. 8vo). He showed 

 that, even excluding the cholera year, Montreal presented a 

 death-rate higher than that of Liverpool (the most unhealthy 

 and overcrowded of English cities) in its most unhealthy 

 epoch, when myriads lived in cellars or fever-beds ; " although 

 for five months in every year its laboratories of pestilence lie 

 harmless in the safe prisons of the ice and snow. ... On the 



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