The Sun.
London, England, 1866-09-06 00:00:00

THE CHOLERA.

MANSION-HOUSE RELIEF COMMITTEE.
Yesterday at 2 o'clock a special meeting of this
Committee was convened at the Mansion-house by
the Lord Mayor, to confer with the chairmen of the
various local committees in the East of London,
who had been specially invited to meet them,
in reference to the distribution of the money
which the Committee has set apart with the
view to aid the recovery of convalescent patients.
The Lord Mayor occupied the chair, and there
were also present Sir Mordaunt Wells, Mr. John
Abel Smith, M.P., the Rev. W. Rogers, Mr.
H. W. Ripley, Mr. C. Hutton, Mr. R. B. Wade,
Mr. R. N. Fowler, Dr. A. Clarke, physician to the
London Hospital, Mr. R. Wigram, and Mr. R.
Hoare. The local committees and bodies repre-
sented on the occasion were those of Bethnal-green,
Bishopsgate, Bow, and Bromley, the German Hos-
pital, Dalton ; the Great Northern Hospital, Hack-
ney, Limehouse, the Metropolitan Free Hospital,
Mile-end Old-town, Mile-end New-town, the Jew-
ish Board of Guardians, Devonshire-square ; Pop-
lar, Ratcliff, Spitalfields, Stepney, St. George's-in-
the-East, and Tower-hill.

The LORD MAYOR, addressing the delegates, ex-
plained that the committee he had the honour to
represent had the subject of dealing with convales-
cents from cholera, which was a pressing one, under
consideration for some time, and had set apart the
sum of £2,000 for that express purpose. That being
so, they had thought it desirable to invite the at-
tendance and co-operation of the chairmen of the
local committees in its distribution. They were in-
duced to believe that by means of the public bounty
they and the Bishop of London's Committee toge-
ther had been the means of arresting the spread of
the epidemic, and so of averting what might other-
wise have become a great national calamity. The
disease having now materially subsided, the case of
the convalescents pressed for immediate action, and
the committee wanted to know from the local autho-
rities the number of persons in their various locali-

ties coming -within that category, and to discuss
with them the best means of sustaining and
strengthening the many unhappy creatures who had
suffered from this severe visitation, and restoring
them to their homes and families, or to such of their
families as were spared to them. The committee
had a certain sum of money intrusted to their care
by the public for that and kindred purposes, and the
great object they had in view was to apply it strictly
to those purposes, taking care at the same time, in
the exercise of what they believed to be a wise dis-
cretion, that they did not add pauperism to pau-
perism—(hear, hear) and desiring, on the
other hand, as the wiser course, to assist those
who were disposed to assist themselves. They had
considered the matter in all its various phases. Some
gentlemen had thought it desirable to erect conva-
lescent hospitals. 'That might well be a question for

future consideration; but the Committee were unani-
mously of opinion that they had first to deal with the
present, and having, as they believed, under God's
providence, been instrumental in mitigating, if not
entirely abating, the disease they might hope, with the
co-operation of the local committee, to whom the
public at large owed the deepest gratitude for the
services they had rendered in the emergency, to ap-
propriate the money in such a way as not only to
afford satisfaction to the subscribers, but confer
lasting good on the poor.
The committee afterwards made the following
grants for assisting convalescents, leaving in every
instance the money to be dispensed for that purpose
at the discretion of the local committees, who are
composed of ministers of religion and other princi-
pal inhabitants of the infected districts—namely,
Bethnal-green, £2OO ; Bishopsgate Ward Visiting
Society, £5O ; Bow and Bromley, £lOO. ;. the Ger-
man Hospital, £5O ; Limehouse, £l5O ; Metropoli-
tan Free Hospital, Devonshire-square, £25; Mile-
end Old Town, £l5O ; Mile-end New Town, £5O ;
Jewish Board of Guardians, £100; Poplar, £5O;
ltatcliff, £5O ; Spitalfields, £l5O ; St. George's-in-
the-East, £lOO ; and the Tower-hill district, £5O ;
making in all voted yesterday for this special pur-
pose, £1,275.
Lon» MAYon intimated that the next object
of the committee was to provide for the maintenance
of the orphans, for which purpose they had set apart
£5,000, and to that end they would hold another
conference with the local committees on an early
day. They had only one object in view, he said,
and that was to do the greatest possible good with
the money which the public had so generously placed
at their disposal and to do it promptly, adding that
nothing could be more gratifying than the cordial
manner in which the local committees, one and all,
had co-operated with them.
The local authorities then took their leave.

Sir M. WELLS, referring to the ravages of the dis-
ease in the district of Limehouse, with a population
of 26,977, said it appeared from a return sent to him
that from the week ending July 14 to that ending
Sept. 1 there had been 182 deaths from cholera and
98 from diarrhcea, or 280 in all ; in other words, in
six weeks, 100th part of the population of Limehouse
had died of the pestilence.

Dr. A. CLARK, physician to the London Hospital,

took occasion to refer, from his own knowledge, to
the great good which Mrs. Gladstone was doing for
convalescent children. At one time, he said, the
hospital was nearly choked with convalescent chil-
dren. They had no homes to go to and no clothes to
put on, and the hospital was fast becoming a sort of
poorhouse,; but Mrs. Gladstone stepped in and re-
moved 28 of these children to the house of charity in
Greek-street, Soho, and afterwards took a tempo-
rary home at Brighton. He had that morning paid a
visit to the House of Charity, and was pleased with
all he saw. The children were happy-looking and
joyous, and altogether the institution was being con-
ducted in a systematic and business-like manner.
The promptitude, he added, with which these poor
children had been dealt gave to the boon twice its
value.

While the subject of affording means to enable con-
valescents to go into the country for the benefit of
fresh air was under consideration, a member of the
committee related a circumstance which had come
under his own observation during the epidemic, to
show how the poor are wedded to their own homes
and modes of life, wretched though these often are
in the last degree. On Saturday while the cholera
was prevalent he visited a poor widow who bad
been taken with the disease, in a room she occupied
with her children in one of the poorest parts of
Spitalfields. He called again on the following Mon-
day and found she was dead and buried, and that her
youngest Child, who had caught the epidemic, had
been taken to the hospital. She had died leaving
nine orphans. He went to see after the family, and
found that four of them had been to a workhouse,
one, the youngest, was in the hospital, and the re-
maining four, three of whom were girls, 18, 17, and
16 years of age, and one a boy of 13, were living in
what he called a piggery belonging to a railway, and
in which there was not a single pane of glass. One
lived by making braid, and the three others by mak-
ing lucifei-match boxes, at which they earned 2d.
a gross, and they could make perhaps three gross a
day. Not one of them could read or write. They
were utterly and absolutely ignorant. They could
not sew, and none of the girls had even a shift. He
offered to clothe them decently, and to give them a
dinner every day, provided they would do a little
sewing in return, but every one of them refused,
saying they would rather live as they were. That
(said the inember of the committee who related 'the
story) was more deplorable, to his mind, than the
prevailing' distress.
It may interest the persons having the care of the
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In reference to certain statements made at the

Mansion-house a few days ago by a local committee
from Bromley and Bow as to the drainage and sani-