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some other places, because the houses of the lower working classes
are not so squalid, and the air not so bad as elsewhere, and the
consequent desire for drink to remove the feelings of malaise and
depression is not so great. Immigration of unmarried persons
between 15 and 25 years of age, and a predominance of females,
act in an opposite direction, but with much less effect on the
mortality of a population. In this respect Hackney benefits
to a rather considerable extent, by the number of young female
servants employed, but it does not participate to a like extent
with the rest of London, as a reference to Table IX. will show.
The late Dr. Letheby laid very considerable stress upon these
causes of variation of death-rate, far more indeed than they
deserved, as the variation in the death-rate of Hackney cannot
have been altered by the excess of females and the immigration
of healthy persons to an extent of one death per annum in each
1000 population; whilst the presence of Lunatic Asylums and
the excessive mortality of their inmates counterbalances this
advantage to a certain extent. That this is the case can readily
be proved by calculating out what is called the normal death-rate
for the district; that is to say, the number of deaths which
would occur in the district per 1000 population if the mortality
at the different ages and of the two sexes occurred at the same
rate as they would by the English Life Tables. The mode of
calculating the normal death-rate will be soon described, and it is
therefore sufficient to say that the normal rate calculated on the
Census of 1871, was for England 22.75, for London 21.79, and
for Hackney 22.04 ; whilst the corrected death-rate for Hackney
for 1841-51 was 19.18; for 1851-61,19.14; for 1861-71, 20.37;
for 1871-75, 20.10 per 1000 population, so that the mortality
which has actually taken place in the district is much below the
number calculated from the Census and the English Life Table,
whilst in all London it was much above the proper death-rate.
The influence exercised on the death-rate by varying proportions
of the sexes in a given population is by no means large.
Thus, if we take the population of England and Wales, which
consisted of 487 males and 513 females, as the basis of our