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10
Here we see the age-channels of these deaths—rills, rivulets, and streams,
which, uniting, form a mighty liver that is brimmed to its banks with the slain
of tuberculosis, and rolls on its way to the great sea of death. And
the great majority are young men and young women, plucked in life's
prime from the frail fingers of time, destined for Eternity, leaving behind
husbands, or wives, or children, as the case may be, mostly unprovided for—
because when the father is taken there is generally left a wife and children'to
struggle on as best they may; and when the victim is a mother there are
usually little ones cast on the tender mercies of friends, neighbours, or hired
women. And what becomes of these neglected little ones ? Charitable institutions
of all kinds, the workhouses, the reformatories, the gaols too
often, can tell the tale. The disease itself, also, frequently overtakes them,
for they cannot have lived in the same confined room, often a mere den, with
a father and mother who daily sowed the seeds of consumption where they
went, without in very many instances becoming themselves infected ; so that
they, too, in course of time are carried away in one of those streams of death.
The President of the Local Government Board has stated in the House of
Commons that for every death from tuberculosis there are four cases of sickness
(in my opinion this is a very mild estimate), and I can well believe it when I look
on a map of the borough spotted with every case that came to my knowledge in
1912, and, recollect, these are only cases of pulmonary tuberculosis. I am certain
you will agree with me that it is the most melancholy record I have put before
this Committee in the course of twenty years. I ask you to examine it and
study it carefully; to note where the cases are aggregated in the greatest
numbers; and then I ask you to multiply the red dots by 10 so that you may
form some faint appreciation of what the record of 10 years has been; and
that you may obtain some idea of what the sufferings and privations—for with
this disease they invariably go hand in hand—of these unfortunate people,
wearied with disease and galled with their necessities, have been. They
represent a sacrament in human suffering too terrible for description. Let me
take a representative case. A young man in the prime of life, say 35 years
of age, is attacked. He is a good workman, gets good wages. He is steady,
industrious, and is married. He has three or four children, and his home is
comfortable and well furnished for his position in life. He has been attacked
with tuberculosis, although he does not know it. At first he merely feels a
lassitude and a disinclination for work. A little later he has a cough, which
gradually becomes worse; he loses a day now and again at his employment;
the disease gathers force, the cough becomes more and more troublesome; he
has night sweats; his strength grows less; he loses more and more time ;
he begins to waste, until at last he is unable to work. He requires nutritious
food he has no money. The rent has to be paid—he has no money. The