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38
CONCLUSION.
year, as general education advances, the sanitary
condition of a district will be an important element
in determining the value of its property. In engaging
houses, men will not only look to rent, and
to rates on rent; they will look also to rates on
life, and will doubt the cheapness of a town residence,
however small in rental, where their lease of
life must be shortened from its intended duration,
and form part of an average mortality two-thirds
higher than in the suburbs. It is an instinct in
this direction, or perhaps the guidance of knowledge,
that within late years has given so much
extension to suburban residence, and has carried
numbers of the wealthier inhabitants of the City
to dwell so far from their places of daily business:
and the same instinct or knowledge yearly acts
more towards the less affluent classes, urging
them to fly as far as possible beyond the smoke and
crowding and unwholesome vapours of the metropolis.
I entertain great hope and little doubt, that
within a few years, the working classes will have
organised for themselves extensive means of suburban
residence; that vast barracks of modelhouses,
rising on healthier soil and amid purer
atmosphere, will receive hundreds of thousands of
inmates from those classes of society which now
throng the courts and alleys of the metropolis; and
that by this spontaneous emigration, in so far as it
may affect the City, great assistance will be given
to those endeavours which will be made, under