View report page

11
out by his work breathes a better atmosphere for some
part of the twenty-four hours, but too many sink under
the ill effects of inhaling during a part of the day air
so loaded with impurity: his strength failing, too often
he has recourse to stimulants to enable him to counteract
the effects of his own home, and he may fall a victim
to some attack which, had his health not been thus
deteriorated, he would easily have shook off. What
do we see in the children who may have survived two
or three of their number already carried to a premature
grave ? The youngest, a baby of two or three months,
has not yet suffered much from the unwholesome
influences ready to receive it; the next, a child of two
years, just able to crawl from chair to chair, with a
very large head and very small limbs, the leg bones
bent by incipient rickets, while the enlarged stomach
and pasty face too truly indicate the certainty of chronic
disease, threatening to render it a cripple or an invalid
for life. Some of the first-born children may have
stamina enough to get out into the world, but all with
weak constitutions, unfit for the wear and tear of life,
destined to fall among the victims of consumption or
to drag on a very sickly existence, perhaps marrying
and increasing by hereditary evils added to the others,
a pauper and degraded population.
It seems to me impossible to exaggerate the importance
of the question of the public health; and I cannot
separate the health of the mind from the health of the
body. I feel confident that if the mental health of the
people continues to deteriorate for another generation,
the most fatal consequences must ensue. No doubt it
is a difficult question, but we are all too much interested
in it to give it up in despair. Our confidence
in the moral order and government of the world, added
to the blessings of enlightened Christianity, should
make us zealous in our endeavours to raise to this