Within the days of this generation what shrieks were heard in the hospital, which have been silenced for ever by a discovery of pain-arresting chloroform! No prayer could still the agony of the knife. The wise surgeon is greater than the priest. If any one would know what pain was in our time, let him read Dr. John Brown's "Rab and his Friends," which sent a pang of dangerous horror into the heart of every woman who read it. Now the meanest hospital gives the poorest patient who enters it a better chance of life than the wealthy could once command.
It was said formerly:—
"The world is a market full of streets,
And Death is a merchant whom every one meets,
If life were a thing which money could buy—
The poor could not live, and the rich would not die."
Now the poor man can deal with death, and buy life on very reasonable terms, if he has commonsense enough to observe half the precepts given him by generous physicians on temperance and prudence.
Not long since no man was tolerated who sought to cure an ailment, or prolong human life in any new way. Even persons so eminent as Harriet Martineau, Dr. Elliotson, and Sir Bulwer Lytton were subjected to public ridicule and resentment because they suffered themselves to be restored to health by mesmerism or hydropathy. But in these libertine and happier days any one who pleases may follow Mesmer, Pressnitz, or even Hahnemann, and attain health by any means open to him, and is no longer expected to die according to the direction of antediluvian doctors.
Until late years the poor man's stomach was regarded as the waste-paper basket of the State, into which anything might be thrown that did not agree with well-to-do digestion. Now, the Indian proverb is taken to be worth heeding—that "Disease enters by the mouth," and the health of the people is counted as part of the wealth of the nation. Pestilence is subjected to conditions. Diseases are checked at will, which formerly had an inscrutable power of defiance. The sanitation of towns is now a public care. True, officers of health have mostly only official noses, but they can be made sensible of nuisances by intelligent occupiers. Economists, less regarded than they ought to be, have proved that it is cheaper to prevent pestilence than bury the dead. Besides, disease, which has no manners, is apt to attack respectable people.
What are workshops now to what they once were? Any hole or stifling room was thought good enough for a man to work in. They, indeed, abound still, but are now regarded as discreditable. Many mills and factories are palaces now compared with what they were. Considering how many millions of men and women are compelled to pass half their lives in some den of industry or other, it is of no mean importance that improvement has set in in workshops.
Co-operative factories have arisen, light, spacious and clean, supplied with cool air in summer and warm air in winter. In my youth men were paid late on Saturday night; poor nailers trudged miles into Birmingham, with their week's work in bags on their backs, who were to be seen hanging about merchants' doors up to ten and eleven o'clock to get payment for their goods. The markets were closing or closed when the poor workers reached them. It was midnight, or Sunday morning, before they arrived at home. Twelve or more hours a day was the ordinary working period. Wages, piece-work and day-work, were cut down at will. I did not know then that these were "the good old times" of which, in after years, I should hear so much.
The great toil of other days in many trades is but exercise now, as exhaustion is limited by mechanical contrivances. A pressman in my employ has worked at a hand-press twenty-four hours continuously, before publishing day. Now a gas engine does all the labour. Machinery is the deliverer which never tires and never grows pale.
The humiliation of the farm labourer is over. He used to sing: