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13
Has then sanitary work been a failure ? Have the labours of a
Graham, a Farr, a Simon, a Letheby, a Buchanan, a Ballard
produced no fruit ? Have we no story of triumph to relate, no
history of a victory to tell ? Most assuredly we have. Sanitary
science has achieved a great success. Imagine us in 1876 living
under the same conditions as, say 50 years ago. In 1801 there was
a population of 10,212 persons, or in other words a population spread
over the whole of Islington, about equal to the population of the
ecclesiastical district of S. John's, Holloway Road. In 1871 the
population was four times what it was in 1841. The open fields are
now replaced by huge manufactories, blocks to air and light, and
consequently to health. Belle Isle is not, as it once was, fragrant with
clover and buttercups. All is altered ; and yet with the mass of
human beings at the present time in Islington, living in homes
surrounded by houses, these interspersed with factories and the like,
robbed in a great measure of its open spaces, of green fields, and of
country air, nevertheless, the death-rate remains the same—no
more—despite it all. This is the great sanitary work we have
effected. Imagine sanitary measures at the same standstill that
they were fifty years ago, and then ask yourselves where, under
such circumstances, would the inhabitants be now, and what deathrate
should we have to chronicle. It has been the energy of
sanitarians which has prevented outbreaks worse than the black
death, and it must be to the same energy, and to the enforcement of
the same sanitary regulations, only perfected by experience, that we
must look in the future to preserve us from evils as bad, or even
worse.
The marriage rate, therefore, in Islington for the whole year is
17.6 per 1000 of the population.
In the United Kingdom it was 14.3 for the first quarter; 16.2
for the second; 16.5 for the third; and 20.1 for the fourth. The
marriage rate for the whole year was therefore 17.0 per 1000.