The Sun.
London, England, 1861-08-13 00:00:00

THE REGISTRAR-GENERAL'S REPORT.

It takes the Registrar-General's office a year
and a-half to analyse the registration results of a
year, the consequence of which is that we have now,
in the middle of 1861, the report of 1859 laid before
us. Whether this could be done more quickly or not 1
we will not inquire at present ; but we may remark 1
that a year and a-half's interval rather takes away
from the freshness of the facts. As the latest sum-
mary, however, of, the great facts of human life
upon the area of England and Wales, the present
report has a claim upon our attention; and it exhi-
bits some valuable results.
Marriage comes first in the Registrar-General's
list, andit would appear that the Established Church
still continues the great tyer of the marriage knot.
Of 167,700 marriages, 136,000 were performed in
churches, 10,800 in Superintendent Registrars'-
offices, the rest in Dissenting and Roman Catholic
chapels. This return of marriages includes a special
class of unions, called in registration language
" re-marriages," singled out for special statistics of
its own, which are intended, we presume, to con-
stitute a basis of hope for the forlorn and nesolate,
and may certainly be consulted with as much ad-
vantage as the Sortes Virgilianee as a ground of
calculation. It may be interesting to know that of
" re-married" persons, 8,000 widowers married-10
use again the accurate language of the Registration-
office—" the same number of widows," while 7,000
bachelors and widows, and 15,000 spinsters and
widowers, fill up the remaining space of the "re-
marriage" department—a numerical proportion
which some may think indicative of unfairness, and
too suggestive of the side on which the initiative
lies in this important step. . Marriage statistics in-
volve another and a very distinct item of statistics,
at first sight rather foreign to this department, and
which one would not naturally have looked to find
in it—we mean educational statistics., It is curious
that the marriage registers supply almost the only
definite piece of statistics we have relating to the
state of adult education in the country, showing
the extent to which the education in the parish
school has been a reality, and has been kept up
after leaving school. The married couples have to
sign their names—a severe test. Of 335,000
nearly 108,000, or 32 per cent., signed with marks
—a number which is not equally divided between
the two sexes—the women who do not write being
to the men in the proportion of 37 to 26 per cent.
This is an improvement, however, upon the mar-
riage registers of twenty years ago, when 32 per
cent. of the men and 48 per cent. of the women were
unable to sign their names, though it is not, at the
same time, so much of an improvement as one might
have expected with the growth of a whole fresh

generation.
We come now to the births, and after we have
heard the agreeable news—now made somewhat
stale by the census—that they were 34,000 above
the births of the year before, we come upon a regis-
tration result which contradicts the general law of
the excess of female over male births. The prepon-
derance was on the other side of the scale in 1859,
the boys being nearly 22 to 21 girls. But the next
piece of statistics is the more important one which
arrests the eye of the watcher of national morality
almost before any other disclosure of the registra-
tion tables. As the marriage register has its educa-
tional results, so the register of births has its moral.
It exhibits for 1859 the blot of a 6 percentage of
births, or lin 15, out of wedlock. It is unnecessary
to comment on a fact upon which everybody will
make the same remarks, and those, of course, very
trite ones. If recourse is had to the common weapon
of recrimination, we believe it could be shown that
many countries have worse figures than these; but
this is a most unsatisfactory line to take. A low
standard once fixed in any large class on this sub-
ject has a very strong tendency to maintain itself,
from the simple circumstance that the culprits keep
one another in countenance, and are, in fact, too
many for any social ban to operate upon. But,
though the respectable poor cannot wholly excom-
municate, as the rich do, they have a certain power
in their hands, and it always makes a difference if
a woman has not been unimpeachably correct.
The ravages of diphtheria occupy the same place
in the Registration Report of 1859 that the plague
or sweating sickness would have occupied in a
registration report of three or four centuries back,
had such official papers f hen been issued ; and we
may congratulate ourselves that we have such a
reduced and softened visitant when the modern
plague does visit us in the shape of some epidemic
with a new name labelled on it by the doctors.
The Report contrasts the statistics of disease, so far
as we are possessed of them, centuries back with
those of the present day. It takes 100,000 people
of the London of 1660-79, and compares them with
the same number of 1859. The same number pre-
sents at the two different dates respectively 357 and
42 annual deaths by smallpox; 759 and 227 by
fever, ague, scarlatina, quinsy, and croup ; 1,079
and 611 by oonsumption and diseases of the breath-
ing organs ; 763 and 8 by dysentery ; 142 and 2 by
scurvy ; 298 and 26 by dropsy ; 1,175 and 136
children's deaths- from convulsions and teething,
and 86 and 17 women's deaths in childbearing. Ail
this decrease in the modern figures is over and
above the decrease which we gain when we count
the deaths of the Great Plague. In one article,
however,—that of diseases of the brain, apoplexy,
paralysis, epilepsy,—the older figures have the ad-
vantage of the later, being 57 then to 151 now,
Some forms of violent death, too, are more nume-
rous now than then, especially deaths from fire,
which are 13 at the present date to 3 at the former
date. The opposite element, however, restores the
balance, cases of drowning being 10 now to 20
then. "The supply of food, and particularly of
vegetable and fresh animal food, in certain seasons
of the year was defective, so that a large portion of
the population became scorbutic. The houses were
nearly as close and dirty as the houses now are in
Constantinople and Cairo; the water supply was
imperfect. Parasitic insects .and diseases of the
skin betrayed its impurities. The dirt of the houses
struck foreigners, the sewers were imperfect, and
the soil gave off marsh malaria." It is deserving of
notice that the only form of disease which has
gained ground in the country is that connected
with the head, which exceeds now by nearly 3 to 1
the amount of the same form of disease at the
former date, as the figures above show. This is, per-
haps, the result of the very civilization and mental
growth to which we are indebted for the improve-
ments in every other sanitary quarter. There is
one sure martyr to all great advance and improve-
ment, and that is the head ; for nothing of this sort
can go on without that prime mover and sustainer.
He might complain a great deal more fairly than
any other of the remonstrant parts of the body in
the old fable. We owe everything to him, and he
has to work hard that the rest of the body may
gain all kinds of new facilities, remedies, and pre.
ventives.— Times.
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