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10 Parish of St. George the Martyr, Southwark.
During the year 1896 the Salvation Army authorities attempted to upset the
decision of Mr. Slade in 1895 convicting them of gross overcrowding. The case was
decided in favour of Mr. Slade. There is reason to believe that, in consequence of the
proceedings undertaken from time to time by your Vestry, the numbers admitted to
the Blackfriars Shelter have been materially decreased. Apart from that fact,
however, the sanitary control over this large collection of poverty-stricken people
housed nightly in the building in question is still in an unsatisfactory condition.
Some idea of the cost of this undertaking to the ratepayers may be gathered from a
paper printed in the Appendix (page 28).

In 1892 the total mortality under this heading was 539, which fell to 419 in 1893,
and to 363 in 1894, and has risen to 394 in 1895 and fallen to 372 in 1896. This rate is
above that of the whole of London. The excess may, I think, be traced to the overcrowded
state of the parish, both as to tenements and to workshops, and to the number
of indoor occupations which predispose to respiratory diseases.
A good deal of the mortality among young children is due to lung troubles, which
often follow measles and whooping cough.
The returns of deaths from consumption are not so heavy as one would expect in
so densely crowded and poverty-stricken a district. At the same time it should be
noted that the registrars have to depend for these figures on the death certificates, and
there can be no doubt that a certain number of cases are not correctly described. This
applies especially to alcoholism, and to such hereditary and constitutional disorders as
syphilis and consumption.
Mortality of Infants and Children.
The death-rates of infants under one year, and of children under five years, afford
valuable indirect evidence of the sanitary well-being of a community.
By this I do not mean that all preventable infant and child mortality is to be
attributed to defective sanitation. Other factors—to be mentioned further on—doubtless
play a considerable part in either destroying or crippling the lives of these
slum-bred children.
The fact remains, however, that the most sensitive test of the sanitary condition
of a district lies in the death-rate prevailing among its young population. During
1896 the number of infants who died within the first year of life in St. George's was
366. These figures give the high rate of 183 deaths to every 1,000 births in St.
George's as compared with 161 deaths per 1,000 births for London. The average rate
for the years 1892-3-4-5-6, for St. George's was 194, and for the Borough Road
Sub-district 225, as against 158 for London.
Of a total of 1,332 deaths at all ages in St. George's, 616 occurred under five
years, which gives the large percentage of 53.8 of the total number of deaths. It is