es. It is a simple but horrible fact that
the poorest class in our big cities still swarms with vermin. And not
only are the poor in great cities thus afflicted. The recent
compulsory medical inspection of school children has shown that in
some of the smiling rural districts of England 80 per cent. of the
children have lice in their heads. Everyone should help to gain
further cleanliness and freedom from this form of oppression.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, England alone, and with
absolute conviction and determination, demonstrated to the civilised
world the beneficial results in diminishing the death-rate of large
towns, to be obtained by cleanliness, the destruction or removal from
man's body and surroundings of organic "dirt," viz. his excreta, the
exudations and exuviations of his body, the waste and fragments of his
food. The names of Rawlinson, Chadwick and Simon remain as those of
the prime movers in that legislation which has given us improved water
supply, sewerage, removal of dust heaps, clearance of cesspits,
cleansing of houses, and prevention of over-crowding. Yet there are
writers who, in ignorance and infected with the modern madness which
makes half-educated Englishmen presume to teach where they have yet to
learn, and to pose as prophets by belittling and running down,
without regard to truth, their own country and its finest efforts in
the cause of civilisation, actually declare that Germany has led the
way in this matter. This is the very reverse of the truth. Foreign
countries are, in this matter, following long in the wake of England.
There are no cities in the world so healthy as British cities.
Practical measures of cleansing, faithful activity in destroying dirt
and preventing over-crowding, enforced by legislation, have reduced
the death-rate of our great centres of population in fifty years by
more than one third--that is to say, from something like 29 per 1,000
to something like 18 per 1,000. No other country can show such a
result.

Gaol-fever, spotted or putrid fever, or typhus fever has practically
ceased to be a regularly occurring disease in the West of Europe. The
last cases in London were, I well remember, in a poor district near
the Marylebone Road about thirty years ago. A very few cases have
appeared since, in the over-crowded and poorest districts of our
largest cities. Beleaguering armies and beleaguered cities suffered
from it as late as in the Crimean War, but we m