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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health—1874 —5.
21
A writer quoting from May hew on the London Poor, says, that there is disclosed here in
London a system of depravity, atrocity, and enormity which certainly cannot be paralleled
in any nation however barbarous ; in any age however dark.
It is the duty of the Government to punish crime, and with a just inflexible rigorousness;
yet, this can only be done at an enormous outlay, and with a wide-spread complicated
machinory: how much loss the cost would be, and how much more humane, the endeavour
to prevent it. If the laws of nature are ignorantly neglected, or selfishly broken we must
suffer the penalty: and crime is one of the bitter results. From this penalty there is no
escape. The "laws of nature are nothing but the goodwill of God expressed in facts."
I often wonder what many of the owners of property think man was created for, except
indeed that he should bo housed in foul wretched dwellings, in order that money may
be put in their purses, and so they may reap where they have not sown. A grim kind of
harvest that will prove. Surely the owners have neither humanity nor justice on their side,
when they allow their houses to become hotbeds for the fostering and spreading of disease
moral and physical, and in which it is impossible either to maintain cleanliness, or support
health, or practise morality. There are thousands of such houses.
I look forward hopefully to the benefits which will follow the carrying out of the
Education Act; and if all the good we fondly expect should not follow, yet the passing
of such a measure is subject for sincerest congratulation. "Education" asserts the greatest
of modern writers, "stands on the basis of everlasting duty. "Heavier wrong" than
neglect of this, "is not done under the sun. It lasts from year to year from century to
century; the blinded sire slaves himself out, and loaves a blinded son; and men made in
the image of God, continue as two-legged beasts of labour; and in the largest empire of
the world, it is debate whether a small portion of the Revenue of one day shall after thirteen
centuries be laid out on it, or not laid out on it." We may rejoice that the state of
things which a few years back called forth this vehement and indignant protest does not
exist. But merely reading and writing, and working out a sum in arithmetic will hardly
suffice. The developement of the intellect alone will not go far in improving man's character,
whilst it may aid him in the practice of higher class crime. Teaching must include
the developement of all the moral powers inherent in man; also the demonstrations of
those laws by which he is governed as a social being, as well as those by which his health
is regulated. He must be shown what is the end and object of life and the way by which
they may be]best reached. And, so, the bonds of a stupid and sullen thraldom broken
he may advance onwards in the race, "and the raw world be drilled for the march of
mind."
I would not have you suppose that what I am now stating to you, is foreign to your
duties as Vestrymen, and to the purpose for which you meet here. It is the very heart
and core of them. The only true and lasting foundation upon which the glory and safety
of a nation can be built, must be upon the cultivation of the moral and physical powers
belonging to man; and we may remember that sanitary science is capacious enough to
embrace the whole of such cultivation, and minute enough to carry out its every detail.
With the great Dramatist of the old days the Sanitarian may say, "I deem nothing foreign
to me which belongs to man."