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(varying from a maximum 108.1 in Kennington 1st., to a
minimum 29.9 in Norwood. These differences in areadensity
are noteworthy, and are accompanied by a corresponding
population density—the tendency in the Inner
Wards being to crowd the houses with persons owing to
the want of sufficient house accommodation and the con
sequent increases in rents. Such a condition of affairs is
conducive to ill-health amongst the inhabitants, and infectious
diseases are more likely to spread and prove fatal.
The conditions, too, under which some of the inhabitants of
the inner Wards live are unsatisfactory—cleanliness, as a
rule, being a word but little understood, whilst poverty,
ignorance and apathy are conspicuous amongst them; and
if to these conditions are added density of population, the
states of many of the houses in which the people have to
live, the want of sufficient air and light in the narrow streets,
courts and alleys, and round the houses generally, intemperance
and overcrowding, the picture is a vivid one and
shows a state of things that tends to a low standard of
general health and to a high rate of mortality. In theory,
such should be the case; and in practice it is found actually
to be so in the Inner Wards of Lambeth Parish, as a
closer examination of the mortality and sickness returns
will show. The portion of the population that suffers most
is the very young, and with a high birth-rate such as
exists in the Inner Districts (even allowing for the lyingin
hospital and the workhouse), the susceptible material is
steadily increasing and falling year by year an easy prey
to the various diseases that principally attack children of
tender years, whose want of vitality at birth is such that,
if they do not succumb in the early periods of their
existences, grow up with impaired constitutions, which, in
their turn, may later be attacked mortally by other diseases.