The Sun.
London, England, 1851-01-29 00:00:00

THE SUN,

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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 185

Additional efforts should unquestionably be made
in furtherance of the scheme of metropolitan sanitary
improvement prior to the opening of this year's In-
dustrial Exhibition, The extraordinary influx of
foreigners into the capital during the summer
months cannot fail to enhance, in a remarkable de-
gree, the necessity for changes of this particular cha-
racter. As yet, however, no alterations of this
description have been anywhere commenced, and
unless a very speedy movement for the close of this
indifference be adventured upon, the inhabitants of
London and Westminster must take the conequenc€ s
Let it be remembered, in regard to this rather
important subject, that not only will the visi-
tors to the Crystal Palace flock hither from
the European continent, and more or less from the
four quarters of the globe, but an immense number
will arrive in the metropolis, collected together in
this particular spot from the adjacent shires, and in
a great measure also from all parts of the United
Kingdom. Country folks who have never seen
the great city, except in the fantastic visions of their
imagination, will hasten up to town during the en-
suing season, for the purpose of at length gratifying
their curiosity. Several thousands—it has even been
calculated by some that, possibly, another million—
will swell the teeming mass of our population.
Under any circumstances a sufficiently large in-
crease will inevitably take place to justify, and
not only to justify, but absolutely to require the em-
ployment of additional means far the orderly arrange-
ment and purification of the capital. Unless some
such supplementary exertion in this direction be at-
tempted the results must infallibly prove most per-
nicious. All the existing provocatives of epidemic
diseases must be multiplied, and at the same time be
strengthened in their virulence. The causes of
malaria, that subtle agent of mortality, must per.
force be enlarged and rendered more than ever de-
structive. To imagine otherwise would be to doubt the
primary laws of Nature. It behoves those entrusted
with the direction of the affairs of the metropolis

to take these truths into their consideration betimes,
so that the danger may not be discovered only at the
moment of its arrival, and when preparatory mea-
sures will be altogether impracticable. Even sup-
posing that the exertions we allude to were to be
discontinued at the close of the Exhibition, they
should be made at any rate for the time, with a view
to their temporary application. Abandon the good
afterwards, if you will, but enable London to rejoice
under its securing influence at the least during the
period of this approaching human inundation. We
say this with the less compunction from a confidence
in the force of experience. We are so fully satisfied
that the advantages arising out of the proposed im-
provements will be too perceptible to admit of their
abandonment when once they have been tried and
recognized. Just as easily could we imagine the
re-imposition of the detestable impost on corn, now that
the Protective system has been abrogated, as that the
old filthy habits of the past should be revived when
once the multitude had observed the benefits of sani-
tary innovation.

Though nothing else were attempted in the way of
forwarding the views of our sanitary reformers, we
would at any rate witness the employment of some
' stringent rules for the carrying out of the Act
passed last session through both Houses of
Parliament for the establishment of the scheme of
extramural interment. Hitherto that law has been
nothing more than a dead letter ; hitherto the hopes
of those who had foolishly counted upon the
measure as a boon have only been miserably
disappointed. Now, at least, we would wit-
ness the enforcement to some extent, however
small, comparatively speaking, of the regulations
faintly marked in the enactment. We would ob-
serve the tardy but final closing up of those pits
of abomination—the intermural burial-grounds of the
metropolis of Great Britain. Looking forward to the
time which will very speedily have arrived, we would
see no more dead bodies crowded into those
hideous nests of corruption, to decay in the midst of
the abodes of the living, and diffuse a terrible poi: on
through the atmosphere. Except these preventive
efforts be made, and that speedily, the churchyards
of London must, with the advance of the
warm weather and the arrival of many
thousands of visitors to the Exhibition, become
more than ever what they have already been desig-
nated with a frightful significance—the manufac-
tories of disease. Fever and contagious maladies
of all imaginable kinds have been germinated by
them even under ordinary circumstances. Under the
extraordinary circumstances to which we are
endeavouring to direct general attention, they
cannot but prove themselves doubly and
trebly the cause as well as the recipients of mor-
tality. In speaking thus we are not indulging
in lugubrious anticipations of a merely fanciful and
conjectural character, we are only looking forward
to the certain consequence of the remissness against
which we are inveighing. We are striving to warn
the authorities before it be too late of the inevitable
results of-their indolence. Let precautions of a very
moderate and very practicable kind be only adven-
tured upon with alacrity, and the good derived from
them will be amply compensative. No reproachful
feelings will weigh down upon the national conscience
of England when the Exhibition has become a thing
of the past, to be thought only of retrospec-
tively. We shall remember then that the people
flocked to our metropolis from the different countries
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observe, moreover, in addition to thes
treasures arrayed under cover of the Crystal Palace,
the signs of our own perceptible advancement. All
these gratifying remembrances may be secured to us
by adopting a few of the precautions already particu-
larised, but without these we fear that the record of
1851 will be marred with many remorseful conside-
rations.