Ye woods, with ice-threads tingling late,
Where late was heard the robin,
Your chants that hour but antedate
When autumn winds are sobbing!
Ye gummy buds, in silken sheath
Hang back, content to glisten!
Hold in, O earth, thy charmèd breath!
Thou air, be still, and listen!
* * * * *
MODEL LODGING-HOUSES IN BOSTON.
The present sanitary condition of our great cities is a reproach to our intelligence not less than to our humanity. Our system of self-government, so far as regards the protection of the mass of the dwellers in cities from the worst physical evils, is now on trial. The tests to which it is exposed are severe. We may boast as we like of our national prosperity, of the rapidity of our material progress,—we may take pride in liberty, in wide extent of territory, in the welcome to our shores of the exiled and the poor of all other lands, or in whatsoever matter of self-gratulation we choose,—but by the side of all these satisfactions stands the fact, that in our chief cities the duration of life is diminishing and the suffering from disease increasing. The question inevitably arises, Is this a consequence of our political system? and if so, is political liberty worth having, are democratic principles worth establishing, if the price to be paid for them is increased insecurity of life and greater wretchedness among the poor? If the origin of these evils is to be found in the incompetency of the government or the inefficiency of individuals in a democracy, a remedy must be applied, or the whole system must be changed.
The intimate connection between physical misery and moral degradation is plain and generally acknowledged. We are startled from time to time at the rapid growth of crime in our cities; but it is the natural result of preexisting physical evils. These evils have become more apparent during the last twenty years than before, and it has been the fashion to attribute their increase, with their frightful consequences, mainly to the enormous Irish immigration, which for a time crowded our streets with poor, foreign in origin, and degraded, not only by hereditary poverty, but by centuries of civil and religious oppression. This view is no doubt in part correct; but the larger share of the evils in our cities is due to causes unconnected in any necessary relation with the immigration,—causes contemporaneous with it in their development, and brought into fuller action by it, rather than consequent upon it.
More than half the sickness and more than half the deaths in New York (and probably the same holds true of our other cities) are due to causes which may be prevented,—in other words, which are the result of individual or municipal neglect, of carelessness or indifference in regard to the known and established laws of life. More than half the children who are born in New York (and the proportion is over forty per cent. in Boston) die before they are five years old. Much is implied in these statements,—among other things, much criminal recklessness and wanton waste of the sources of wealth and strength in a state.
In Paris, in London, and in other European cities, the average mortality has been gradually diminishing during the last fifty years. In New York, on the contrary, it has increased with frightful rapidity; and in Boston, though the increase has not been so alarming, it has been steady and rapid. [Footnote: The facts upon winch these statements are based are recorded in the Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts, 1850,—in the Annual Reports of the Boston City Registrar,—in the Annual Reports of the New York Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor,—and in other public documents.
It appears that the ratio of deaths to population was,
In New York, in 1810, 1 in 46.46
" 1840, 1 in 39.74
" 1850, 1 in 33.52
" 1857, 1 in 27.15