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17
MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
9 per cent, fewer. Small-pox, it is true, is doubled;
but the prevention of this disease rests, out of your
jurisdiction, in the exercise of individual discretion.
Under the item of infantile diarrhoea (included in
the tenth column) there is likewise an increase of
nearly a third*; an exception probably dependent
on the fact that, during last year, many deaths
which might have swelled this column were (on account
of the then prevalent influence) catalogued
under the head of epidemic diarrhoea or cholera.
I should be misleading your Honourable Court,
and practising a deception which next year's registry
would expose, if I pretended that the striking
difference between the two years' several totals of
preventable deaths (a difference which, leaving cholera
out of the question, probably amounts to a
diminution of 30 per cent. on the sum of last year)
had resulted wholly, or even chiefly, from sanitary
improvement, and could be interpreted as the evidence
of permanent physical changes around our
poorer population. I guard you against this impression
now, because, however satisfactory it might be
as a momentary belief, it would lead to subsequent
disappointment; and any future rise in the proportion
of these deaths would induce the erroneous but
disheartening supposition, that your later sanitary
* In the column referred to, this is concealed by the marked
diminution, during the present year, of other disorders classed
with infantile diarrhoea. Their reduction maintains the total of
that column (notwithstanding the difference of diarrhoea) considerably
less for this year than for last.