Our social experience joins its testimony with these statistics of town and country, to show how widespread is this destruction of health. Every housekeeper knows the extreme difficulty of obtaining a healthy servant; nine-tenths of those who apply for a situation are suffering from some chronic form of disease, which, if they belonged to a different class of society, would place them in the list of permanent invalids. There is no more frequent cause of the ill-health of domestic servants than the damp and sunless rooms in which they pass so much of their time, owing to the injurious practice of building dwelling-houses, both in town and country, without a cellar under the whole house, drained, and ventilated from side to side. No room is fit for human habitation which has not a six-foot cellar, dry, with ample through ventilation underneath it. It seems surprising that, in a damp climate like ours, with rheumatism and scrofula prevailing everywhere, this necessity has not been perceived. It is often thought that sanitary knowledge means chiefly ventilation, food, and drainage; that it applies only to the lower classes, and that we must await the action of Government to build better houses and otherwise deal with the gigantic question of pauperism. This is a profound mistake. Health depends upon the observance of all the laws of our complex nature; it applies to the mind as well as the body. A deteriorating influence which proceeds from within is more to be dreaded than one that comes from without. The nervous system (from mental or physical causes) may be completely shattered, leaving the individual a wreck. The senses (from mental or physical causes) may be rendered so craving and irritable that the noble proportion of the nature is lost. An hysterical, feeble person is an unhealthy one; equally unhealthy is a coarse, brutal one. In either case, health, in the true meaning of the word, is thoroughly impaired. Those classes of society who are able to command every physical appliance that wealth will purchase are often, from their kind of suffering, more dangerously diseased than the labouring classes. I need only mention the spread of luxury, the delay of marriage, the frail progeny of unsuitable unions, to show how inextricably the mind and body are blended in all that concerns health. The highest authority on this subject thus condenses the lessons of his great work on health: ‘Hygiene is based upon the physical and moral perfectibility of man, of which it furnishes the proof.’ ‘Health may be described in two words--morality, competence.’ The general deterioration of health prevailing in all classes and both sexes is most strikingly seen amongst women. It is proved by the increase of nervous and special diseases, the prevalence of scrofula by general fragility of constitution, and inability to bear the unavoidable burdens of life.