The Sun.
London, England, 1859-02-12 00:00:00

CHOLERA and DIPHTHERIA !

The impressive report of Mr. GEORGE GRAHAM,
the able and giftedßegistrar-General of England—
the particular report now referred to, dated from
Somerset House, on the first of this present month
of February—is in its every syllable so directly
to the purpose that we would fain have it read far,
and wide by every thinking man both within and
without the walls of the legislative palace at
Westminster. At the outset of the more im-
portant section of the report, Mr. GRAHAM
reminds the public of Lord BYRON having
once upon a time, in justification of his
plain speaking, quoted the sardonic sentence
of VOLTAIRE—" La pudeur enfuit des cceurs, s'est
refugieesur les levres." Coming, thereupon, directly
to the point, the Registrar-General refers to France
by way of appropriate illustration. He says—how
truly, let every traveller answer—that " if the per-
fumery of France is exquisite, if her cuisine is the
despair of English gourmands ; if her acts are
admirable ; if her society is charming.; her
'cabinets' are everywhere detestable." He adds
that they literally give mat a la gorge to
Englishmen. Yet have we small reason
in truth to plume ourselves upon any fancied
superiority in this respect upon our own side of the
Channel. The report has already intimated the
painful truth of our own monstrous culpability in
not yet initiating the required most rational social
reform, when it is observed in general terms that
the evil complained of has for years past been in-
creasing annually in all the cities of Europe with-
out distinction, " from St. Petersburg to Paris,
from Vienna and Venice to London and
Liverpool." What comes home, however, nation-
ally to every French household, " stinks in the
nostrils" of the whole population of our vast metro-
polis, surging to and fro twice regularly each way
in the course of every twenty-four hours—steadily
up and down with the ebb and flow of the tide
along the channel of that broad river of the
Thames, running pestilence and liquid disease
among 2,500,000 inhabitants. The distribution of
the evil complained of among the houses of the
Parisians has been touched upon with a droll
particularity by one of the most keen and
humorous observers among travelled Englishmen.
We allude to the veteran Sir FRANCIS B. HEAD,
who, in his delightful " Faggot of French Sticks,"
Vol. ii., p, 12, amuses his readers with the comical
record of his own experience. He had just ensconced
himself in a new apartment greatly to his liking—
"My Lodging" is the heading of the chapter—
when the calamity forces itself upon the recog-
nition of his olfactory nerves. He describes him-
' self as standing at the moment " very much in the
attitude of a young artist joyously admiring the
painting he has just concluded, when, with great
velocity, there shot past his nose—to tell the truth
it actually hit it—an arrow of air about a foot
long, but no thicker than a piece of packthread,
that did not smell as it ought to do. 6lt is the
breath of envy,' said I to myself, ' mortified at my
happiness." Some hours afterwards, he writes,
" I retired to my apartment, and, like a young
lover, was again admiring its charms, when another
little arrow, from an unpleasant quiver, flew by
' me. It's all fancy,' said Ito myself ; it can't
come from my kind landlady, nor from my chest
of drawers. I'm two stories above the drains,
and two stories below the gutters of this
world " and so forth, in his bewildered
self communings..... The infliction recurs from
that time forth, as Mrs. ANASTASIA'S PIPER
would say repeatually. Until—muttering to him-
self the familiar words " home, sweet home"—
the travelledEnglishman, ringing the belly requests
the garcon to ascertain whether Madame would be
visible to him. Then—" in broken sentences and
faltering accents" Sir FRANCIS tells him that—(we
quote his own graphic record)—" the room was
in every respect all I could desire, BUT that
• . . it . . . had . . . at times . .

• . a very unpleasant smell.' 'Now, Monsieur !'
she replied. with great gentleness. I assured
her that it was the case. ' Now, Mon-
sieur I P she replied with greater gentleness,
'Madame,'
headache, from
said,
It has twice over given me a
w shui e lag at this
y ing my handmom e
nflatc,
on my
forehead, am ir n"No,
Monsieur,' she repeated,
so
that I could. hardly hear it_gen7tlyanad so faintly,
dnsoontoth
the
description. Now, the only
close of the grotesque
difference with us in this matter, as compared with
our neighbours, is discoverable in the circumstance
that the agreeable little bouquets distributed there
among the population, are here combined into one
monstrous whole, resulting not in headaches and
alone, but in diphtheria and diarrhoea,
cholera and consumption.

The sanitary reform so long demanded, the
Registrar-General reminds us, would be not merely
the removal of one evil, but the substitution for it
of a very wonderful advantage. Upon this point
he writes—" LIEBIG, the great agricultural chemist
of Europe, has recently reminded us of English
guano as a substitute for foreign supplies." Fur-
thermore, upon this point, he adds—" Science has
demonstrated that fermenting human excrement is
a poison in and near human dwellings; and
chemistry has shewn that the same ele-
ments in other states become grasses,
in, fruit, and flowers by the natural magic of
the earth.,,
Finally, as solemn words of warning,
to which we would.
earnestly conunend the atten-