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37
CONCLUSION.
for the rights of property—they afe not only pecuniary.
Life, too, is a great property, and your Act
asserts its rights. The landlord of some overthronged
lodging-house complains, that to reduce
the numbers of his tenantry, to lay on water, to
erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable
sanitary work, would dimmish his rental: in the
spirit of your Act, it is held a sufficient reply, that
human life is at stake, and that a landlord, in his
dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor,
cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of
cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial
habits, or let to them for hire—at however moderate
a rent, the certain occasions of suffering and
death.
And indeed,gentlemen, the mere pecuniary import
of life thus squandered is not inconsiderable. The
costs of medical attendance on these superfluities of
disease are heavy items of parochial expenditure;
and although much of the undue mortality is of
children, and consists in the premature extinction
of life that hitherto has no market value (costing
only the tears that are shed for it) yet there likewise
occur among your preventable deaths, very
many cases in which adult life is sacrificed, with all
its strength and utility, and where, beside the
wasted capital which that loss implies, there often
remains for the district which has poisoned the
man, an entailment of orphanage and widowhood.
Nor again, can it be questioned, that year by