[17]. Vide Dr. Barham’s Report on Truro, Appendix.
[18]. These Tables are compiled from deaths which took place in Manchester during the year 1840; in Leeds during the year 1840; in Liverpool during the year 1840; in Bath during the year 1839; in Bethnal Green during the year 1839; in the Strand union during the year 1840; in the Kendal union during the year ended 30th September, 1841; in the county of Wilts during the year 1840; and in Rutland during the three years 1838, 1839, and 1840.
[19]. A brief explanation of the construction of tables of mortality may be desirable to prevent misapprehensions by those who are unacquainted with the nature of such evidence. If amongst 4481 who die each year, as at Leeds, it be found that altogether, man, woman, and child, they have lived 92,734 years, that number equally divided, without distinction of the old and young, gives 21 years as the average period of life. The variations of such average periods, as shown by the tables showing the mean periods of death of a whole population, are deemed the best test of its condition and progress. The tables of proportional mortality are such as those of Liverpool, where, out of 223,054 inhabitants, 7435 die; that is to say, one-thirtieth of the ascertained population are swept away every year. Such tables only serve, however, for remote comparison of the condition of different districts, for it will be perceived how large will be the different conditions of two communities having exactly the same proportions of mortality, but in one of which the deaths occur principally amongst the infant population, and the other in which they occur amongst the adults. Thus in all the parishes of Leeds, where the average age of deaths of all who die is 21 years, since the deaths occur chiefly at young ages amongst the labouring classes, the proportions of the population who die annually is only 1 in 37. The average age of death, or the average extent of life to every individual, may go on increasing, and yet the proportions who die remain the same. Hence it is that statistical returns of the proportions of death, which are so generally used, are fundamentally unstable as means of ascertaining the progressive sanitary condition of a population in different countries. The probabilities of life at different periods of life on which insurance companies act, are determined by tables of a different construction. To form a table of the probabilities of life at given periods, in 1000 cases say, the date of the birth in each case is ascertained, and observations are made of how many remain alive at the end of each year at the different periods of life. From the different ages at which that 1000 have died, it is held to be probable that every other 1000 persons similarly circumstanced will die. The observations on which tables of this description have been founded have generally been from mixed classes differently circumstanced, and no observations on a basis sufficiently large, that I am aware, have been made to determine the probabilities of life to any one class of workpeople, or to any one class of professional persons. The three tables of the proportions of deaths at different ages would be of little service to indicate the probability of life at different ages unless we could ascertain with exactness the precise numbers of the classes living from which the deaths have occurred. More than half the children of the working classes die, and only one-fifth of the children of the gentry die, before the fifth year of age; and after having attained that age, the probabilities of life of the labourer’s child might be greater than that of the child of the person of the superior classes; but though we have other evidence that the reverse is the case, we have not the evidence of well-constructed tables of the probability of life at different periods strictly applicable to that class. Though the proportions per cent. of those who die in the higher and in the lower classes approximate in the periods between 20 and 60 years of age, yet we know that the probabilities of life in each class at each period are widely different. The probable duration of life of a miner who had attained 40 years of age may not be, and we have reason to believe is not, half that of the agricultural labourer, not one-third that of a person of the higher ranks who had attained the same period.
[20]. It is the practice in Geneva for female servants to delay marriage until they have saved enough to furnish a house, &c. In illustration of this state of things it is stated that in 290 out of 956 marriages, the female was at the time of marriage older than the male. With further advances in prosperity, it is anticipated that age of marriage would again diminish.
[21]. “Out of 100 deaths in the 16th century, 25·92 were children in their first year; in the 17th century, 23·72; in the 18th century, 20·12; in 1801–13, they were 16·57; and in 1814–33, they were 13·85.” In Liverpool, the number of children which in the year 1840 died under one year of age was no less than 23 per cent., or what it was in Geneva in the 17th century. In the county of Wilts where the proportionate mortality is 1 in 58, the deaths of children in the first year were 16 per cent. Dr. Griffin, in a report on the sanitary condition of the population of Limerick, where the births appear to bear such proportions to the marriages as they appear to have borne in Geneva in the earliest periods, namely, of five children to a marriage, and more in the worst-conditioned districts, makes an important observation on the subject: “I find that as the poor nurse their own children, there is in general an interval of about two years between the birth of one child and that of the next; but if the child dies early on the breast, this interval will be much shorter; and if this occurs often, there will be a certain number born as it were for the purpose of dying; and these being soon replaced, the same number may still be preserved as if there had been few or no deaths, or only the ordinary number.” Of these 55 per cent. died.
[22]. The registries in England at present supply no means of distinguishing the migrant population who die in given places; and in each return a small proportion of deaths have been omitted where the station of the party has not been described; but taking as approximations the returns of the ages of all who die, no district examined appears to present so high a probability of life as at Geneva. The average age of all who died in the respective periods before stated appear, from the returns I have obtained, to be in the county of Rutland 39 years; in the Kendal union 36; in the county of Wilts 35 years; in Bath 31; in the Kensington union 30; in the Strand union 28; in the Whitechapel union 27; in Bethnal-green 21; in Leeds 21; in Manchester 20; in Bolton 19; in Liverpool 17. By the Northampton Tables the probability of life in infancy to all born was 25 years; in Carlisle it was 38.
[23]. Some constitutions are found which resist vaccine matter. Here and there constitutions appear which resist all the noxious influences by which they are surrounded, and attain extreme old age. Not unfrequently we find the existence of these solitary individuals referred to as proofs of the general salubrity of the very circumstances under which generations have fallen and been buried around them. It is a singular fact, as yet unexplained, that the greatest proportion of centenarians are of the labouring classes; and that instances of them have from time to time appeared amidst the crowded populations in some of the worst neighbourhoods in London, where the average duration of life is the lowest. It is remarked by Mr. Mallet, that in Geneva extreme old age has not participated in the prolongation of life which has taken place in the less advanced ages. In the periods of from 60 to 70 years of age the amelioration is inconsiderable; after 70 years there is no perceptible improvement; after 80 years the aged have indeed a little less probability of life at the present time than they had in the 16th century. Centenarians, who were not rare in the 16th and 17th centuries, now disappear; during the last 27 years Geneva has not produced a single one.
[24]. Bibliothèque Universelle, September, 1831.
In Alexandria, which is a seat of pestilence, where the Arab population leave the ordure before their doors (as we have seen large classes of the lower population do in this country), where the dog is the only scavenger of the animal refuse (as the pig is in many districts in our towns), where those who have died of plague remain unburied for days amidst the abodes of the living (as those who have died of fever often do in the poorest districts in this country),—there, under the more powerful action of a burning sun, disease and death are proportionately rife; and, as shown by some returns of death in 1841, out of a population of 60,000, the deaths were 7,017 (of which 1,165 only were from plague), or more than one-tenth of the population. It is known, however, that in the well-cleansed and best streets, inhabited by the European and fluctuating population, the proportion of mortality is not greater than amidst a similar population in the towns of Europe; but it is stated that the lower population, notwithstanding that it has been decimated by the annual mortality, has, within the last quarter of a century, more than doubled.
[25]. An English military officer, who has had much practice as an engineer, and who has done much to protect the health of the population of one of the South American towns, by drainage, whose opinion I took on the efficiency of measures for cleansing inferior districts, recently informed me that he should take advantage of a favourable change which had occurred in one of the recent revolutions, to return to South America, and try what he agreed was the most efficient course of proceeding, commencing with the middle classes, by inducing the new government to undertake works for bringing water into the houses of the inhabitants, and adopt the self-acting system of cleansing the poorest districts, and the use of the refuse for distant production, on the principles established in this Report.