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62
well-organised system of medical visitation, very
much may be effected towards encountering attacks
of the disease while still amenable to treatment:—
that these with similar precautions are therefore
to be recommended.
And not for a moment would I seem to depreciate
such measures, palliative only, and partial
though they be. By their judicious application,
from Aldgate to the Temple, life may possibly be
saved to some hundreds; to children that are
fondly loved, to parents that are the stay of
numbers.
But against the full significance of any epidemic,
I am bound to tell you that these are but poor
substitutes for protection. To render them effectual—even
in their narrow sphere of operation,
these must be great vigilance and great expenditure;
a weary vigilance and a dis-proportionate
expenditure, because chiefly given to defeat in
detail what should have been prevented in principle.
And be done what may, in this palliative spirit,
the sources of the disease are substantially unstayed:
for the faults, to which its metropolitan prevalence
is due, consist not simply in a number of individual
mis-managements, but include a common and
radical mal-construction as their chief.
No city—so far as Science may be trusted, can
deserve immunity from epidemic disease, except by
making absolute cleanliness the first law of its
existence; such cleanliness, I mean, as consists in