as a fit place to locate the homes of artisans and laborers. The better construction of tenement-houses under the eye of vigilant sanitary inspectors has produced a truly marvelously diminished death-rate. In the mud hovels of Ireland—cabins of only one room—the average continuance of life was twenty-six and a half years, when in the rural cottages of English agricultural laborers it was from fifty to fifty-six. In the model homes for laborers that have been built within the last twenty years in London, the death-rate has been brought down lower than in the best parts of rural England. Chadwick says that houses in the wynds of Glasgow were in a worse condition than the most loathsome prisons Howard visited, with a death-rate of forty-two in the thousand; sanitation has brought it down to twenty-eight, and in corresponding quarters in London it has been brought down to seventeen or eighteen, and the rebuilding of the fifteen acres adjacent to Bethnal Green will reduce it still further.
House-drainage—synonymous with properly constructed plumbing—has justly engaged a large share of attention from the sanitarian. By thorough attention to it (her sewers and water-supply were right before) Boston has reduced her death-rate from thirty-one to twenty. Croydon, England, which had a death-rate of twenty-eight, has brought it down to thirteen. These are only specimens of what has become an almost universal movement among intelligent communities.
The next life-saving advance is the superior ease of warming our houses—made possible by the improved locomotion that brings the wealth of the coal-mines to our doors and enables us to maintain a steady fire from fall to spring, that diffuses a gentle warmth all over the house, and forestalls all possibility of "taking a chill" while waiting for the fire to kindle. Even the friction-match comes in for its share of the prolonging of life. Doubtless many a fatal pneumonia and pleurisy has been contracted when the luckless householder's fire had died out overnight, and he was struggling with flint, steel, and tinder-box. It is only half a century since the indispensable friction-match came into general use.
The comfort of the warmed, luxuriously furnished, storm-defying railroad-car, contrasted with the exposure and discomfort of the stage-coach, needs but to be alluded to.
Another factor that has contributed largely, no doubt, to the diminution of mortality is the cessation of intramural interments and the establishment of cemeteries—often justly described as "rural"—removed from the busy centers of population. There are no statistics on which to found a comparison, but the known chemical products of mortal decay, and the known porosity of the earth, are of themselves enough to convince the thinking
