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circumstances rarely see. I have said formerly, and I say again,
that (although important improvements have been made), there
are many localities in Peckham which, in great measure from
want of sewerage, are still in a condition to make them (in the
presence of epidemics of cholera or of fever) hot-beds of these
diseases. Fortunately we have escaped such disasters. Doubtless
some of these conditions have influenced injuriously the
death-rate of Peckham. But Dulwich comprises mainly the
houses of the rich, Peckham mainly the houses of the poor.
A typical Dulwich household consists of the father, mother and
children, and of a considerable number of other persons—
domestic servants—in the prime of life, and for the most part in
the prime of health, draughted, so to speak, from the poorer
households and therefore from the poorer localities. Now the
mortality in such a household is as a rule the mortality of the
family, and not the mortality of the servants of the family. If
the latter become ill and die, their deaths rarely if ever occur in
the houses to which they are attached; their own homes or the
hospital become their final refuge. So that in such a household
there is, in varying but often large proportion, a population
which can add nothing to the deaths of the household, and the
presence of which, in a statistical sense, must necessarily therefore
produce a fallacious appearance of healthiness; a condition
the exact converse of that which obtains at a workhouse or a
hospital. Obviously Dulwich, which comprises such households
in large proportion, owes no inconsiderable proportion of
its apparent healthiness to this cause. Peckham, on the other
hand, comprises in large measure the houses of the poor. Their
inmates consist of the parents and a family of children, but of
no domestic servants. In fact, the elder and adult children are
just the material of which domestic servants are made, and have
probably quitted home for service elsewhere. So that in such a
household, not only are the numbers not swelled by the influx