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6
This table shews a higher birth-rate than the English average, the excess being
6.4 per thousand, and an annual rate of mortality only 1.7 per thousand beyond the 20
accepted by the Registrar General as an index of fair sanitation in cities. Its other
columns demonstrate the urgent necessity of hearty co-operation, on the part of the
public with the sanitary authority, so that the now far too high 'child death-rate" may,
by the stamping out of preventable disease, be reduced to nominal limits. These
should not exceed 10 per cent.*
But, so long as concealment of murderous ailments like small-pox, measles,
whooping-cough, scarlet fever, diptheria, &c. is systematically practised by heads of
families, and encouraged by advisers from whom better counsel might reasonably be
expected ; whilst sufferers and convalescents from communicable disease are unblushingly
parading in streets, schools, churches, recreation grounds and public conveyances/
whilst the efforts of yourselves and your officers to provide proper isolation and disinfection
of such persons and their belongings are derided, reviled and defied; until, in a
word, compulsory notification to the responsible public body, of all cases of illness, as
well as death, is legally enforced, and non-compliance therewith rendered a penal
offence; so long will almost every other one of those innocents on whose behalf against
ignorance we pay a sum larger than the Crimean war tax, be needlessly suffered to die
before completing the fifth year of their lives; and so long will the shortcomings of
"permissive" as opposed to "compulsory " sanitary legislation be evident.
* Mr. E. Chadwick, C.B., and Dr. Richardsgn.