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29
the former of these sub-districts the cholera mortality
per 10,000 was 19 ; in the latter 47: and it is easy
to show that additional sanitary errors soon develop
a larger fatality. Not far from your boundary, at
the same level with these two sub-districts, in the
Hackney-Road division of Bethnal-Green, it rose
to 110; this large mortality being principally confined
to a very small portion of the district, wherein
(the local Registrar reports) sewers were almost
entirely absent, houses were contaminated with the
filth of years, streets were remaining for days
uncleansed from accumulating dirt, and all waste
water (including animal secretions) were uniformly
thrown into the public way.
Such are the conditions under which, at any
imaginable height in the metropolis, Cholera may
decimate a population: such, in their worst form,
were the conditions which at Merthyr-Tydvil—
several hundred feet above the water-level, carried
the cholera-mortality to more than double the high
metropolitan rate just mentioned. Taught by
this case the power of human mismanagement to
futilise the favours of Nature; taught, that perverse
ingenuity can construct poison-beds for the
development of Cholera, high above the usual
track of its devastation, one gladly turns from the
horrible instructiveness of such a lesson, to gather
the kindred evidence of contrast; and happily there
is abundant evidence to show, how much may be
effected, even in the most tainted districts, to