in a small and heated apartment in
London, with no perflation of fresh air, is perfectly analogous to a
standing pool in Ethiopia full of bodies of dead locusts. The poison
generated in both cases is the same; the difference is merely in the
degree of its potency. Nature with her burning sun, her stilled and
pent up wind, her stagnant and teeming marsh, manufactures plague on
a large and fearful scale. Poverty in her hut, covered with her
rags, surrounded with her filth, striving with all her might to keep
out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates nature but too
successfully: the process and the product are the same; the only
difference is in the magnitude of the result.

'But the magnitude of the result in London, if that magnitude be
estimated by the numbers attacked, is not slight. From returns
received from the Bethnal Green and Whitechapel Unions it appears
that during the last year there occurred of fever cases,

In the Bethnal Green Union 2,084

In the Whitechapel Union 2,557

Total 4,641

The state of things described above by Dr. Southwood Smith is by no means
confined to the metropolis; nor, even, is it to be seen in its worst form
there. Mr. Chadwick says, "the most wretched of the stationary
population of which I have been able to obtain any account, or that I
have ever seen, was that which I saw in company with Dr. Arnott, and
others, in the wynds of Edinburgh and Glasgow." I forbear to add their
detailed report, which, as regards Glasgow especially, represents a
loathsome state of filth and wretchedness. If we go now to the
manufacturing towns of England, the evidence is of a similar character.
"The following extract," says the Sanitary Report, "is descriptive of the
condition of large classes of tenements in the manufacturing towns of
Lancashire. It is from the report of Mr. Pearson, the medical officer of
the Wigan Union."

"From the few observations which I have been enabled to make
respecting the causes of fever during the two months which I have
held the situation of house-surgeon to the Dispensary, I am inclined
to consider the filthy condition of the town as being the most
prominent source. Many of the streets are unpaved and almost covered
with stagnant water, which lodges in numerous large holes which exist
upon their surface, and into which the inh