You cannot disclose to them the suffering you have endured on your beds of sickness, and by which your wives and children have been hurried to their early graves--there is no column in the tables of the Registrar-General which can show that; but you can tell them that you know, and you can remind them that they admit, that by proper sanitary regulations the same duration of life may be extended to you and your families that is at present enjoyed by professional persons, and that it is possible to obtain for the whole of a town population at least such an average duration of life as is already experienced in some parts of it. In your workshops, in your clubs, in your institutes, obtain signatures to your petitions: get every labourer, every artisan, every tradesman whom you can influence, to sign petitions. Other things must also be done before your condition can be rendered prosperous; but this must precede every real improvement: the sources of the poison that infects the atmosphere you breathe must be dried up before you can be healthy, and uncleanliness must be removed from the exterior of your dwellings before you can find or make a Home.--I am your friend and servant, SOUTHWOOD SMITH. _1st January 1847._ In this same year 1847 a Royal Commission--"Metropolitan Sanitary Commission" (of which my grandfather was a member)--was appointed to inquire "whether any, and what, sanitary measures were required for London." To the country at large, however, it seemed as if perhaps there had been enough "inquiring." The thing _had_ been considered. Surely something might be _done_; and Lord Morpeth now brought forward a Government measure for "improving the health of towns in England." In bringing in the bill, Lord Morpeth first gives a history of the principal stages of the various inquiries and commissions which had been helped on by all parties, and by successive Governments. He states that he has nothing new to bring forward, and can but repeat the information gained by others. He goes on to show by elaborate statistics the waste of life in large towns. "Thus the inhabitants of London," he sums up, "compared with England at large, lose eight years of their lives, of Liverpool nineteen. The population of the large towns in England being 4,000,000, the annual loss is between 21,000 and 22,000."[22] But all places are not equally unhealthy, as further statistics strikingly show. Where do we find the greatest number of deaths? Is it where wages are lowest and the people poorest? What did Lord Morpeth tell the House?