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The infantile mortality under one year was equal to one
hundred and sixteen per thousand births and including mortality
at all ages under five years, two hundred and sixty-two per
thousand births, comparing favourably with the infantile mortality
of 1894, when the deaths were one hundred and forty-one
per thousand births under one year of age.
Table V. contains a veritable sanitary history of the parish
of Battersea since 1856, the year in which modern sanitation
first came into existence under the provisions of the Metropolis
Local Management Act of 1855, and by which sanitary authorities,
in the form of Vestries and District Boards, the latter consisting
of small parishes grouped together, were first constituted for
London as a whole. This parish at that time consisted of a
congeries of small villages, between which extended market
gardens; the inhabitants and dependents of some few dozens of
large houses, the residences chiefly of merchants, with the
workers at the market gardens, constituting the principal population.
It will be observed that the population was then but
15,069, and at the census of 1861, had but reached the number
of 19,582. The birth rate was then a little higher than now.
The death rate, however, although the population was very
sparse, was much higher than at present. It has been laid down
as an axiom that mortality increases in direct proportion to the
density of population, and it is the aim of modern sanitation to
limit or prevent such increase. That the same parish, of course
with the same superficial area, should, with a ten-fold population
have a reduced instead of an augmented death rate, shews
that the authority having charge of the sanitation, which
includes the health condition and duration of lives of the
inhabitants has performed its public duties in an exemplary
manner.