11
and enable us to declare that if the children of these classes were given to us from very infancy they need be vagrants and delinquents no longer, but honest and productive citizens.
To those who are unacquainted with the subject in detail in principle—the popular test of central legislation and of local administration, of either political party, may be deemed extravagant; yet on due examination it will be found that the wastefulness of ignorance, of bad central legislation, and of bad local administration, causing sickness and premature mortality, may actually be tested by the nose—now by the odours of stagnation and of putrefaction, now by the gases of stagnation, by putrefaction in rooms, by defective supplies of water, by stagnant cisternage which absorbs foul gases, by the odours of putrefaction from sewers of deposit, by the odours of putrefaction from ill-formed and ill-cleansed streets, and by the eye indeed, as well as the nose, in unwashed children and unwashed workpeople in the byways and the highways.
In a sentence, low sanitary conditions of populations are everywhere the sources of irritations, of despair, of disorder; whilst high sanitary conditions are the sources of satisfaction, of political security, prosperity, order, and peace.
Mr. Chairman, Lords and Gentlemen, I thank you most sincerely for the consolation and happy assurance of the great future which your testimonial conveys to me. Looking further back than perhaps any one here present can look, I do see, I confess, in the progress of the past, an augury for the future which fills me with all the delight that can fill with the brightness of hope a human heart that has beat so long as mine. I see in the happier, because healthier children that are being nurtured, what may fitly be called the new birth of health that is in promise for the world. My satisfaction may not be equal to my thankfulness, but it is sufficient in this respect, that it is a richer satisfaction than has fallen to the lot of most men who have devoted all their energies to the work of national reform, in matters that lie nearest to the most vital of all that is national, the vitality of the nation and its power for strength and endurance in the career of nations.
