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HABITATIONS AND SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE POOR. 87
struction of these averages, the most dissimilar
materials are blended together; and the density of
population is apparently reduced by the very large
number of business-houses which have no resident
inmates, beyond the porter or the laundress who
has charge of them. If you turn from the deceptions
of an average to an exact analysis of detail,
you will find many single rooms in the City with a
larger number of inmates than you might otherwise
ascribe to entire houses. Instances are innumerable,
in which a single room is occupied by a whole
family—whatever may be its number, and whatever
the ages and sexes of the children ; where birth and
death go on side by side; where the mother in
travail, or the child with small-pox, or the corpse
waiting interment, has no separation from the rest.
This is evil enough; but worse remains behind.
It is no uncommon thing, in a room of twelve feet
square or less, to find three or four families styed
together (perhaps with infectious disease among
them) filling the same space night and day—men,
women, and children, in the promiscuous intimacy
of cattle*. Of these inmates it is nearly superfluous
* I purposely refrain from any attempt to illustrate all the
horrors which are incidental to this method of life; but, as a single
exemplification of the text (chosen, not because of its rarity,
but because it happens to occur at the moment) I insert an
extract frem a note, with which I was favoured a fortnight ago,
by Mr. Hutchinson, surgeon to the North District of the West
London Union: " I was sent for to attend a poor Irish woman
in labor, at half-past six o'clock yesterday morning, at 17, Fox
G 2