rtality, there is official crime somewhere. Nature
must have been fraudulently obstructed in the benignest arrangements
she ever made for removing the effete material of a vast city's vital
processes. In the matter of climate, New York experiences such
comparative freedom from sudden changes as belongs to her position in
the midst of large masses of water. She enjoys nearly entire immunity
from fogs and damp or chilly winds. Her weather is decided, and her
population are liable to no one local and predominant class of disease.
So far as her hygienic condition depends upon quantity and quality of
food, her communications with the interior give her an exceptional
guaranty. Despite the poverty which her lower classes share in kind,
though to a much less degree, with those of other commercial capitals,
there is no metropolis in the world where the general average of comfort
and luxury stands higher through all the social grades. It is further to
be recollected that health and the chief comforts of life are
correlative,--that the squalid family is the unhealthy family, and that,
as we import our squalor, so also we import the materials and conditions
of our disease. This _a priori_ view is amply sustained by the
statistics of our charitable institutions. Dr. Alanson S. Jones, whose
position as President of the Board of Surgeons attached to the
Metropolitan Police Commission combines with his minute culture in the
sciences ministering to his profession to make him a first-class
authority upon the sanitary statistics of New York, states that the
large majority of deaths, and cases of disease, occur in that city among
the recent foreign immigrants,--and that the same source furnishes the
vast proportion of inmates of our hospitals, almshouses, asylums, and
other institutions of charity; furthermore, that two thirds of all the
deaths in New York City occur among children,--a class to which
metropolitan conditions are decidedly unfavorable; and that, while the
seven hundred thousand inhabitants of Philadelphia are distributed over
an area of one hundred and thirty square miles, the one million
inhabitants of New York are included within the limit of thirty-five
square miles, yet the excess of proportionate mortality in the latter
city by no means corresponds to its density of settlement. It is safe to
affirm, that, taking all the elements into calculation, there is no city
in the civilized world with an equal population and an equa