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35
or others similarly conditioned, they meet with a
readier sympathy, and, amidst little to excite their
envy, find it easier to retire and die.
The remedy for much of the poverty—the parent
of so much disease, not to speak of crime, and of the
many ills referred to—would be found in emigration,
which, whilst benefiting both those who leave the
country and those who remain, would at the same
time lighten the burden of the social and moral
reformer, who is too exclusively looking to education,
temperance, and self-control, for the improvement of
the masses of the people. Education is an invaluable
acquisition, illumining and smoothing the path of its
possessor, whilst temperance and self-control are
virtues which yield their own reward; but for the
majority of mankind they cannot supersede the
necessity of labour which is its ordained lot, and is
the urgent want of so many hands at home and of
so many lands abroad.
It will be observed that the same low death-rate
obtained in the Parish in 1881 as in the previous
year. Notwithstanding the prevalence of smallpox
the Registrar-General remarks that "only once
(1850) since civil registration began had a lower
death-rate been recorded in the Metropolis." In
calculating the rate no account is taken of the
deaths, unknown to me, of parishioners in the