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12
To effect these cleansings and alterations, 499 Notices have
been served, and 211 Second Notices. Summonses have been
issued in not more than half a dozen cases.
HOUSE TO HOUSE VISITATION.
If a complete house to house visitation were made throughout
the Hamlet, even at the rate of two or three streets per week, to
ascertain the state of drainage and repair, so far as is influential
on health, and to enforce compliance with that part of the Act of
Parliament which regulates the communication with the existing
sewers, I feel assured that we should individually experience
the benefit in pocket as well as in health. For in an unhealthy
district, the full enjoyment of health is comparatively unknown
within its limits. A freedom from prevalent disease is accepted
and acknowledged as health; but there are many, from being
possessed of constitutional strength and organization, who are able
to resist for a time a certain amount of injury and poisonous
influence, without exhibiting any specific form of disease, yet,
are made conscious of defective health through deteriorated
functional action, and although they may escape Typhus and its
congeners, are suffering obscure and irreparable damage in vital
organs, with a consequent shortening of their existence; then, if
poor, they become an expense to the rate-payers, both in sickness
and death; and if rich, cease, by the curtailment of life, to
contribute their quota to the general expenses of the community.
The value of life might possibly be computed in a moneyscale,
which would show how much is actually lost to the public
by permitting removable causes of human destruction. From
two to three hundred lives, according to a fair computation,
might be saved annually in Mile End by a thorough system of
sanitary regulation and local improvement. True it is, that it
could not be accomplished without some public expense and
sacrifice of individual interests.
Immunity from epidemic disease for a long period, such as we
have recently experienced, and may even now almost be said to
enjoy, is aptto create indifference to its dangers, and to induce us to