he Metropolitan
Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.

I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher civilisation,
when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories and
workshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; when
officers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilation
of every room in which persons are employed for hire; and empowered also
to demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether in
country or in town. To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner
far see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free
country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law;
carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily,
from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity. I appeal, therefore, to the
good feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whom
they employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutely
need, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsible
to their country and their God.

And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me--"Why make
all this fuss about ventilation? Our forefathers got on very well
without it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors did
nothing of the kind. Our ancestors got on usually very ill in these
matters: and when they got on well, it was because they had good
ventilation in spite of themselves.

First. They got on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances of
longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average
in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages
were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and
strong. The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the
majority died from the severity of the training. Savages do not increase
in number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for many
centuries. I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics of
disease: but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state
and of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no
hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far
greater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague,
plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air--devastated
this land and Europe in those days with a horri