The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-10-05 00:00:00

" Pulpit drum ecclesiastic,"

we have presented to us topics of unwearying in-
terest and public importance, handled in quite a
masterly manner. The present number opens
with an interesting article on the National Health ;
so a propos at this very moment, when cholera is
desolating some districts, and threatening the deso-
lation of others. We commend it for its bold
speaking, as well as its forcible and energetic advo-
cacy of more extensive sanitary measures. We
particularly recommend the following to the earnest
attention of all Commissioners of Sewers :

"From thew cesspool sewers, and huge stagnant revs •-
voirs of fcetid mud ; from these vast retorts generating foul
air, we see landlord avarice, and selfishness in other shapes,
sending up into the atmosphere the raw material of all epi-
demics, (as American slavery sends us cotton), to be woven
up into manifold textures—typhus, small-pox, erysipelas,
dysentery, cholera, the mournful fabrics of misery, sewed by
the sweating system' into ever ready-made garments of
death. Yes, as the Hindoo sorcerers say, in the drain dwells
the sewer-fiend, and thence his breath issues up through
gully -shoots' and man-holes,' (the very words have a
ghastly smack with them) and thence he steals, during the
silent watches of the night, when doors and windows are
closed, and the children of toil sleep the sleep of the weary,
and the demon breathes over them; and the strong hand of
the father relaxes, the young children pine away, and the pale
mother and her new-born infant droop and die. But as in
the small, clean, cheap, effectual pipe-drainage, the rats can
no longer preserve their footing, and are decamping from the
country towns to which the Health Act. has been applied,
up to their impregnable citadel of London, and the protec-
tion of the Commissioners of Sewers,—so, by means of
syphon-traps, and water at high pressure, to flush all out
and away from human habitations, to be spread over distant
fields and gardens, the sewer-fiend may also be banished from
the precincts of man ; and whatsoever mortality it may please
Almighty God to require from us, that which arises from
filth and foul air, (probably one half of the whole), will, at
least be driven away."

Here is a specimen of plain out-speaking, and
from such a quarter too !
" We cannot help remarking on the droll, patronising,
apologetic way in which some very good people, recent con-
verts to health measures, speak of the operations of sanitary
reformers. They carefully apprise their readers and hearers,
that the prerogative of life and death is by no means sought
to be taken away from the Supreme Disposer of events by the
Health Act. Well-meaning ignorance, even among religious
people, will soon accommodate itself to the true laws of
health, as a few years ago it had to accommodate itself to
the new geology."

We next Co-me to a glowing picture of the fright-
ful misery abounding in a few notorious metropoli-
tan districts. We can ourselves guarantee its
truthfulness. It would, however, be well for us to
look nearer home, and observe whether or no such
scenes as are herein desbribed, be not as justly appli-
cable to our Northern towns, and perhaps with
more melancholy and terrible appropriateness :
" Let us now glance at the Report of Dr. Sutherland on
the district of St. Giles's and St. George's, Bloomsbury,

' We willingly admit that these are'not attractive topics ;
and this, indeed, is the chief reason they are so little known
or heeded by the comfortable, healthy public ; but those who
wish to cure this canker which is eating into England, must
probe it to the bottom, and make themselves familiar, as a
physician does in individual ailments, with all the symptoms
of the disease.

" St. Giles's is a world-wide proverb for misery, destitu-
tion, and crime. Before the Rookery was pulled down, it
was one of the sights of the metropolis, and the district still
supplies localities in which, the timid country visitor gazes as
he. would into one of the lower circles of Dante's 'Hell.'
Misery's darkest cavern' is ever painted here :---
Where hopeless Anguish pours his groan,
And lonely Want retires to die.'
The burly reckless burglar, his brute strength steeped in
drunkenness by day, strides down Church-street to the gin-
palace as the winter evening closes ; the unknown murderer,
being roused with fear of suspicion--the far-off provincial
newspaper, which contains his description, and offers a re-
ward for his capture, in his pocket—follows stealthily behind ;
here, a young girl, from whose flushed, faded features, all
the heaven that lay round them in their infancy has not yet
faded ; and there a worn-out haggard woman of thirty who
was once---though her own mother could not now look in
her face and recall it---the belle of a Warwickshire village,
with a puny wrinkled child, that looks like an infantile old
man, in her arms ; these, with the common-herd of common
wretches who haunt the epidemic districts of life, form the
population of this fever den of the metropolis of the world.
How much of the wretchedness and vice which have
so long given a bad distinction to St. Giles', is owing to
the filth, over-crowding, and want of the common requi-
sites for decency, it is impossible to tell; but the history
of all the unimproved, as well as that of the improved
dwellings of the poor, both in the metropolis and provincial
towns, as we shall show, demonstrates that a very large
portion of the suffering, death, vice—yes, and crime, is to
be traced to the reckless cupidity and total disregard of
the health and morals of their tenantry, displayed by the
owners of the bad house-property, in which the unhappy
and helpless creatures dwell."
We well know that such scenes as these herein
depicted, are not exclusively confined to London,
but abound in almost, if not in every large
town in England ; of which the recent disgusting
disclosures with reference to Newcastle, are suffi-
cient and startling evidences. We shall close our
review with the following sweeping censures levied

" Then, as to education. At the opening of the Free
Library, at Manchester, on the 18th of October, 1852. Mr.
Pollock said, he believed if there was any class to whom
it was of peculiar and essential importance to know the
rights and privileges possessed by the meanest inhabitants
of the country, it was more important to the poor than the
rich, to the miserable and degraded in worldly circumstances,
than to the wealthy and enlightened.'

" Such, sentiments as these are often u
meetings, and are often • applauded. But 1
are these rights of the miserable and the
enter a well-ventilated free library or ci
listen to doctrines they cannot comprehene
their dens of disease ? One would think
of their first and most essential riL
fresh air. The respectable library-going working men arc
not the representatives of their class, still less of those nr;
able and degraded ones to whom the speaker ref,-
tens of thousands of the.poor, miserable, and de
a purer atmosphere, and -less squalid homes
where but among books ; it is only the
long for the luxury of the intellectual atmospt
library.

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they are any

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" Yet follow home many of these decent-looking inert
reading at the tables; or boys seated on the floor because
the tallies are full, and you will find most of them passing
through the filthiest lanes to homes around which the
daughter or mother arc exposed to degrading and demoraliz-

ing -scenes, and where children are lyinJ

of preventible

diseases.
" The libraries ! Most benevolent are their founders ;' but
the danger is of satisfying their benevolent sentiment with
this alone, The skinning over of the malignant wound that
is eating into the social life of England, is too much the sur-
gery of the benevolence of the day ? If the. Samaritans of
society will probe the wound, they. will find it too deep:for
this artificial surgery. In this, as in all medical and surgical
malady, we must begin with sound measures of general

hvfrjene

Give our working-men flagged courts, and syphon-
tapped tabular sewers, with water at high pressure,. or
rather procure them the liberty of paying the two-pence a-
week which will buy all this, and they will soon cease to require
the charity of free libraries, for they will establish libraries
of their own. Infant and ragged schools,—can anything_ be
more excellent ? Yes, to save the lives of as many infants
among the poor as now survive to come to the schools ; to
arrest the fevers and consumptions which fill the schools with
ragged children—this is more excellent : to do this, will
alone enable present benevolence to go further and do more.

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