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17
houses. The yards at the back are about two feet wide and each
yard extends the length of the corresponding building. In this
narrow space the builder has managed to stow a privy a few feet
from the back door. The privies in two of the houses were
crammed to the boards; in all, in a highly disgusting state, and
every time the back door is opened a puff of gas is let in. Well one
woman might tell me that she lost two children with the cholera
during the last epidemic, and that two other persons in the court
died of the same complaint; four out of twenty-four, or one-sixth
of the whole population of the place. The privies, however, remain
in the same state as they were in 1849 and in 1854, exhaling
their successive instalments of putrefaction and death, and
waiting quietly till some other epidemic comes to more than decimate
the inhabitants of the row, unless the merciful hand of this
Vestry interfere to prevent such a calamity.
Since my last Report I have often been told that all endeavours
to ameliorate the social condition of the poorer classes will turn out
a failure; that there is, was, and always will be, in a large community,
an under-current of ignorance and filth, vice and barbarism
constantly tearing out the vitals of society, which no education can
tame, and no sanitary enactments ever cleanse or amend; that our
attempts, like those of our predecessors, will not benefit the people,
and that we are ploughing a soil which will never bear any crop
but thorns and thistles to those who cultivate it. A ready answer
to this obsolete reasoning presents itself. Are the better and educated
classes to abandon hopelessly to all the horrors of physical
uncleanliness and moral degradation, men of the same race living by
the side of them, and lighted by the same civilization as themselves'!
Are they to leave the stagnant mass of humanity that grovels in the
dark lanes, alleys, and turnings of the metropolis to fester and
rankle in its dirt and obscenity ? Does not every generous feeling
urge us to help them out of the foul atmosphere in which they have
till now been allowed to inhale the breath of life ? Hitherto, in all
attempts to improve the humbler ranks of society, the school has
been thought the only place in which education has been acquired ;
but alas ! the education of the school is too soon forgotten in the
filth, discomfort, and bad habits of the home. This Vestry does
not undertake to teach the people of Rotherhithe to read, write, or
cypher, that must be an arduous task indeed, when we see that the
Legislature of the country, cannot agree how it is to be done. This
Vestry, working in a humbler sphere, merely seeks to improve the
habits of the inhabitants. They introduce water into the dwellings
to promote cleanliness which has hitherto been impossible to the
people, and in the train of cleanliness follow decency, order, and
self-respect, and self-respect leads to the respect of others, thenpersons
and their property. They (the Vestry) wish to ventilate
and purify the overcrowded habitations, because they believe that
men and women ought not to herd together like swine, or like
c