Such is the destitution among many of the labouring class, and the vast amount of disease which prevails among them, is the necessary consequence. The following facts illustrate well the influence which scanty food, insufficient clothing, and the privations attendant upon poverty, exert in the production of disease. During the last three months (10th February 1839), the fishermen and potters living in Prestonpans, have been in a very destitute condition, the former, partly from the very boisterous weather which has prevented their going regularly to sea, and the latter from the closure of the potteries at which they were employed. During that time, these two classes of people have been suffering much from fever, about ten of their number having died in that short period; while the people, amounting to 750, including children, connected with Prestongrange colliery, who are well employed, well paid, and well fed, though inhabiting the same locality, and the houses stretching from Prestonpans to Musselburgh Links, have been almost entirely free of that disease, fever having affected two of those families only, in the course of the same time; and while fever is still prevailing extensively among the potters and fishermen, the people connected with the colliery have been entirely free of that disease since about the 7th of last December. On these facts I am well informed, being the medical attendant of the colliery. Let us mark the operation of the same or similar circumstances upon soldiers; the consequences of exposure to cold, to the inclemency of the weather, of the want of sufficient clothing, and of habitations, among young and robust men, employed in the most active and spirit stirring occupations, connected with the most kindling and heart-rousing anticipations, and flushed with the glory and honour of victory. Let the case be that of Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia, perhaps the most remarkable recorded in human history, and that, perhaps, will equal any that will yet mark the future career of man, in the total discomfiture, in the unspeakable sufferings, in the awful destruction of human life, and, in short, in the triumph of nature over humanity, which, from beginning to end, attended the disastrous retreat of that mighty congregation of France’s bravest sons. Let the case be that of the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow, which, alas, was one horrid series of unprecedented disasters, of wreck upon wreck, whose course was one prolonged deathbed—one white, one snow-white shroud—one extended grave, which barely spared enough to convey the fatal tidings, and which received heroes by thousands, valour and all that is ennobling in the mass, which monuments can never note,—and broken hearts and broken ties, those of husband, of father, and of comrade, for which tears have flowed, but which tears can never bind again.