“Depend upon it, the moral and physical training of the people is more influenced by lessons—whether in health and cleanliness, or in religion and morality—that they are constantly receiving at their own firesides than by any extraneous teachings.
“When a child has been allowed to grow up with a diseased body, and a polluted mind, in a wretched room, without light, without cleanliness, and without any notions of decency, our curative efforts, whether medical, missionary, or reformatory, are as mere patchwork compared with the great preventive precaution of keeping his home as pure, as decent, and as wholesome, as possible.”
No more powerful description can be given of the moral evils of overcrowding than that of Dr. J. Simon in 1865:—
“Where ‘overcrowding’ exists in its sanitary sense, almost always it exists even more perniciously in certain moral senses. In its higher degrees it almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such mutual exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human.
“To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy.”[85]
Overcrowding was not confined to tenement-house rooms alone. The great bulk of the working classes left their overcrowded abodes to do their day’s work in overcrowded factories, workshops, and workplaces; and in very many such places men, women, and even children were crammed together in rooms where healthy existence was impossible.
A great deal of information on this great branch of the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of London is given in the Reports from the Commissioners on Children’s Employment, and in the very valuable reports of special inquiries instituted by the Medical Department of the Privy Council.
One of these inquiries related to Bakehouses, of which there were about 3,000 in the metropolis in 1862.[86]
As a rule the place in which the bread of London was made was what in houses in general was the coal-hole and the front kitchen.
Very many bakehouses in London were stated to be in a shockingly filthy state, arising from imperfect sewerage and bad ventilation and neglect, and the bread must, during the process of fermentation, get impregnated with the noxious gases.