agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer classes in the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on “Public Health.” To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On the condition of town dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr, Simon. “Although my official point of view,” he says, “is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored.… In its higher degrees it [i.e., overcrowding] almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness.”[1]
London takes the first place in overcrowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings. “He feels clear,” says Dr. Hunter, “on two points; first, that there are about 20 large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the crowded and delapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case 20 years ago.”[2] “It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal.”[3]
Further, the better-off part of the working class, together
- ↑ Public Health, eighth report, 1865, p. 14, note.
- ↑ l. c., p. 89. With reference to the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter says: “People are not now alive to tell us how children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began, and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to be expected from the present growth of children, who, under circumstances probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing their education for future practice, as “dangerous classes” by sitting up half the night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and quarrelsome.” (l. c., p. 56.)
- ↑ l. c., p. 62.
