View report page

30
yet been devised to ensure to all children the protection of this
safe and simple operation.
The number of children successfully vaccinated by myself in
1861 was 105, and doubtless several received protection during the
same period at the hands of the other resident practitioners; but
there is still some reason to fear a goodly number of children of both
the poor and well-to-do classes are growing up without this protection
being afforded them, or even thought of by their parents.
The increase of the population, as exhibited by the excess of
births over deaths in the year under review is 45, the births having
numbered 169, and the deaths 124; but there has been, it is estimated,
a much greater increase by immigration since the taking
of the last census. The question therefore to be asked is the same
as that asked by the Registrar-General in respect to all London,
"Is the town equal to the task of providing by new and improved
arrangements for the constant accumulation of human beings within
its limits?" "The growth of a population," continues this
authority, "is not a strength to be trusted, but a weakness to be
feared, if improvements in its physical and moral condition is not
commensurate with the growing urgency of its wants; for when a
family increases in its narrow dwelling in circumstances of dirt
and squallor, that increase which should be its blessing becomes its
bane." There can be no doubt that in this parish the poor increase
much faster than do the other classes of inhabitants, and yet
it is a fact that scarcely a single fresh dwelling was erected during the
past year for the accommodation of that class. Nothing else, it is
feared, can follow the inadequate supply of houses to the increase
of the labouring population, but overcrowding and all its attendant
evils.
Quite as many of the same bad influences as ever appear to be
at work in causing a large infant mortality. Ignorance and neglect
of physiological laws are still the great producers, in the young
especially, of moral and physical degradation; mothers engaged in
field and other labour still continue to neglect their offspring at a
time when the supply of their natural wants is most imperative;
and indifferent and scanty food, and the impure atmosphere of the
one living and sleeping room, which so many of this class are compelled
to breathe, still operate with the same force and certainty in
causing scrofula and other prostrating diseases. If we add to this
catalogue of causes those of wilful neglect and criminality, the
contemplation becomes a painful one indeed.*
*The following is from the "Times" of a recent date, and relates to one of the
greatest social evils of the age—to one which cannot engago too much of the
attention of both sanitarians and philanthropists "Infancy in London has to