Those who thus arrived at the great principle of the connection between defective sanitary conditions and disease, laid the foundation of Sanitary Reform. That connection is an old truth now,--one of those about which it is difficult to realise that it could ever have been unknown to the world; but in those days it was unknown and unrecognised, and amongst the few who began to recognise it, there were scarcely any who saw to what wide practical results such truths ought to lead. My grandfather, however, saw that if the principle were once established, not only would the quarantine laws, at that time absurd and inefficacious, be modified; not only would our merchant ships be released from spending long weary months in unhealthy ports, while their crews were perhaps contracting, from their confinement, the very diseases which they were supposed to have brought with them from foreign lands; not only would the poor sufferers from plague and yellow fever cease to be imprisoned in the poisoned districts whose air had just given them the pestilence;--not only would these _false_ precautions cease, but the true ones would be taken: the _causes_ of disease would be removed; and thus, wherever a knowledge of this law spread and was acted on, disease and death would diminish. Might not, he thought, something practical be done _now_ and _here_ if these facts were once generally known? Epidemics throughout follow the same laws. Were not the very causes which produce plague in Egypt operating now to produce typhus fever in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel? We might not be able to stop the pestilential, moisture-laden wind that came down to Cairo each year at the time of the inundation of the Nile, but could we not do something towards purifying that which crept into the rooms of our own poor from undrained courts and stagnant pools? Could we not, if people once believed and acted on their belief, banish the yearly epidemic fever from the back-streets of our large towns? Dr Southwood Smith believed that this great result would follow from the general acceptance of the truth of the principle he had announced. He gave his life to spreading the knowledge of it. By the articles in the 'Westminster Review' something was done towards enlightening the public mind, for I find that they attracted the attention of leading men in and out of Parliament, and were often referred to in the debates in both Houses.