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window, the shutters contain;—as No. 10, Mead Street,
with its rooms 3 feet lower down than the street, with its
covered-in yard and overflowing privy and drain, where
there has not been for months any water supply;—as Turville
Buildings, Hepworth, Miring, and Nelson Places, Princes',
Baker's, Shepherd's Courts, &c., &c.; and the conversion
of their sites into better or Model Dwellings,—I know not
how they can be adapted to cleanliness, comfort, or health.
From the cradle to the grave their inmates "are a dircct
money charge upon our funds."
7. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.
The data furnished in this and in my former Report show,
that comparing area and population, Bethnal Green is, by no
means, overcrowded, and that, notwithstanding the rapid
increase of its people, health and life have progressed. They
show, also, that wherever sewers and drainage have been
made, there mortality has most decreased. As we have yet
much open ground, and as our new streets will be effectively
drained, so, within certain limits, as our numbers grow, the
value of life will increase. Hence if we supply our darker
spots —"where the fuel is piled, and the spark is there"—
with the sanatory remedies that they require, we may hereafter,
as Sanitation has effected in the City, reduce our death
roll, annually, 2 per 1000. Those remedies I have endeavoured
to portray: they are briefly the greatest attainable
purification of the soil and air, "the utmost possible improvement
of each individual home." By their adoption we shall
exalt the standard of life, and in the emphatic words of the
Registrar-General, "obtain victories over death and the
grave." So, too, shall we wipe out the reproach of 1849,
that Cholera was allowed to fall on Bethnal Green as though
the name of the pestilence had never been heard.*
* Official Circular of Board of Health, Sept. 29, 1849, p. 107.