“I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary system can be adequate to the requirements of the time, or can cure those radical evils which infest the under framework of society, unless the importance be distinctly recognised and the duty manfully undertaken of improving the social condition of the poor….
“Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?
“To my duty it alone belongs, in such respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this—a curtain which propriety may gladly leave unraised—you cannot but see that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while Society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism.”
And what was the physical result of this state of living?
“In some spots in the City you would see houses, courts, and streets, where the habitual proportion of deaths is far beyond the heaviest pestilence rate known for any metropolitan district aggregately—localities where the habitual rate of death is more appalling than any such averages can enable you to conceive.
“Among their dense population it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery, and the children who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit warren perish in early infancy.
“The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born … often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.
“Typhus prevails as a habitual pestilence.
“The death rate during the last five years has been at the rate of about twenty-four per 1,000 per annum.
“The City of London appears peculiarly fatal to infant life.