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13
less likely to frequent the public house, if the children sleep
in a separate apartment, so that he can have a quiet chat
with a friend by his own fireside ? These and a thousand
similar ideas will suggest themselves, of the benefits likely to
result, if a resident body of gentlemen, whose interest it is
to keep down the poor rates, were to take the place of some
of the ignorant, or needy, or utterly reckless lessees of houses.
Of all methods of helping the poor, too, none is so likely
to put them into the way of helping themselves, as the
providing them with clean and wholesome houses. Instead of
coals and blankets, give them warmer and dryer habitations.
A guinea is better spent in averting consumption, by letting
in the sun, and keeping out the damp from a poor man's
house, than in a subscription to the Consumption Hospital,
when the mischief ia done.
Instead, then, of giving alms in the shape of money,
which will go into the pockets of their landlords, give them,
what too often they cannot get for money,* a wholesome
home. Charge a fair price, and insist on being paid.
Fever hospitals, and hospitals for children, are very well
as stop-gaps; but we do insist, that the most economical
way of spending money is, to go at once to the root of the
evil, and provide homes that shall be free from putrid
effluvia; and prohibit the attempt to rear children in kitchens
and cellars, where they become early victims to scrofula, if
they escape fever.
IV. The following are some of the details of cases
* During this quarter, a girl died of purpura (a kind of scurvy
arising from impoverished blood), at 3, George Yard, Brown Street;
and the medical attendant added to his certificate, a memorandum on
the unwholesomeness of the room in which the family resides. The
only thing to be said is, that so many others are as bad or worse, that
it is impossible to condemn one without condemning all.