By placing the charity schools in the vicinity of these squares an advantage would be offered to the children of the poor which can rarely be procured for them, that of experiencing the salutary action of the sun, breathing a pure air, and taking their exercise safe from all danger during vacations and play-hours.
These powerful considerations naturally lead the council to speak of the construction of houses under the double relation of public and private health.
“There are,” they say, “in the march of civilization, as in that of sciences, epochs of progress which should be marked by the creation of new laws. With all nations the monuments which attest their pride have preceded the monuments which testify to their true glory; the first, sterile, so to speak, in their existence, fix the attention by the beauty of their form, by the elegance and grandeur of their proportions; the second, created for the wealth or happiness of nations, attract our notice to the utility or wisdom of their establishment. This epoch of true glory has arrived for France. Enough of sterile monuments cover her soil, still unfruitful in so many respects. Works of public utility, laws which conduce to the common happiness, these are the monuments that it is proposed to raise at the present day.
“It is a monument of this last kind of which the council ventures to suggest the erection, in demanding a law to regulate the construction of towns, villages, and houses, under the double relation of public and private health; a monumental law, if ever there was one, since it will embrace France in its conceptions; all the citizens will enjoy its benefits with a perfect equality; and the poor man, even more than the rich, will find himself protected by it in his health, in his life, in his happiness; because health is life—it is more, it is happiness.
“A similar law has never existed among any ancient people, although we find among several of them no equivocal proofs of the solicitude of their legislators to introduce into the laws some precepts of health, applicable to the people they governed.
“We certainly find among the greater part of modern nations some ordinances, and regulations, relative to the salubrity of towns and houses; but their operation does not extend beyond the localities for which they were made, and little, or not at all, known out of these localities, they are still very imperfect, and altogether insufficient for the localities themselves.
“Nevertheless, can any one doubt the immense influence which the salubrity of towns, of villages, and of the dwelling, even when it is isolated in the midst of fields, exercises on the health and life of the people. All statistics, general and individual, attest this extreme influence; and there is no physician, a little observing, who has not had frequent occasions to verify it at the bed-side of his patients.
“We must be like the men, so well painted by the Psalmist, to reject such evidence—eyes have they and see not. How shall we explain, or rather, to what shall we attribute the difference that is remarked between the mortality of one quarter and that of another quarter of the same town; of one street and that of another street of the same quarter or of the same village; or, lastly, the difference that is observed in this respect between the houses of the same street, and those houses which are completely isolated. Misery, it is replied to us, is the cause. Yes, without doubt, misery is a powerful cause; but it is so especially when it is driven back into the most insalubrious quarters, streets, and houses; when it lives habitually in the midst of filth and dirt, that is to say, in the midst of an infected atmosphere; and when there is no misery, or when it exists in the same degree in the quarters, in the villages, in the streets, and in the houses with which the comparison is made, and, stronger still, when poverty is met with precisely there where there is the least mortality, in what is to be found the cause of this difference, if it is not in the insalubrity of the dwelling-places?
“If you had not seen yourself, Monsieur le Prefet, in one of the most beautiful streets of Paris, and in the vicinity of the most frequented promenade of the capital, the influence which the construction of the houses we inhabit has on the health, we would seek by some facts to convince you of this truth; but we are happy to need only to refer you to your own experience. This great fact, which naturally results from the comparison you have drawn, in a report addressed to the Minister of Commerce, the 31st of June, 1832, between the mortality of the quarter of the Hôtel-de-Ville, and that of the quarter of the Chaussée-d’Antin, has not escaped you. Yet, in the striking difference which is found between the mortality of these two quarters, you have not taken into account the poor who died in the hospitals, and who were, undeniably, more numerous from the quarter of the Hôtel-de-Ville than from that of the Chaussée-d’Antin. What calculation has demonstrated to you for one quarter of Paris exists in all in different degrees; and the same calculation applied to other localities, very distant from the capital, in which the condition, the habits, the mode of living, and the nature of the labour which the inhabitants perform are nearly the same, has given analogous results, presenting the same extremes, without the possibility of assigning any other cause than the insalubrity of the dwellings understood in its widest acceptation.
“The council might accumulate facts, calculations, and quotations, to support the opinion they have formed of the necessity of a law to regulate the construction of towns, villages, and houses, under the double relation of public and private health; but they have no need to be at this pains to induce you to share their conviction, and they are fully persuaded that, in proposing to you to promote a law so important, they are only anticipating your desire to co-operate for the well-being: of your fellow-citizens, and to aid the enlightened zeal of the Minister of the Interior for all that is great and useful.”