A most important factor in the causation of disease was the moral condition of the population, which was very low, and marked by superstition, ignorance, and brutality. An age when even the better classes crowded into Smithfield to see some poor wretch burnt; when the most brutal punishments were inflicted for comparatively slight offences; when kings beheaded their subjects and even their wives, almost as a matter of course; when the ghastly heads of executed persons stared from the city gates; when religious-minded Puritans could do nothing with a misguided king but behead him; and when restored “monarchy” exhumed the dead bodies of political offenders in order that it might wreak an unmeaning vengeance on a corpse; and when even ladies in good positions in society flocked to see these sickening exhibitions,[A] was not an age in which the nobler feelings of Christianity were easily evoked; and without these feelings, measures for securing public health, which cannot be fostered except in connection with public decency, found no place among the ideas of governors or governed. [A] “To my Lady Batten’s; where my wife and she are lately come back again from being abroad, and seeing of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw hanged and buried at Tyburne.”--“Pepys’s Diary,” Jan. 31, 1660-61. The public amusements were many of them brutal and cruel. Tournaments were less brutal than bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting, because they fostered animal courage; but animal courage it most distinctly was. Fitz-Stephen mentions the drunkenness of the population in the 12th century, and there can be little doubt that when beer was the only drink--the drink which Queen Elizabeth took for breakfast--a state of fuddle from drink must have been exceedingly common. From Chamberlayne’s “Present State of England,” I gather that in the year after the Fire, 452,563 barrels of strong beer, at 12s. 6d. the barrel; 580,420 barrels of ale, at 16s. the barrel; and 489,797 barrels of small beer, at 6s. 6d. the barrel, were consumed in London, which (if we take the population at that time at 500,000) allows about three barrels, or 108 gallons, or some 1,440 pints per head per annum. Again, Chamberlayne, speaking of the causes of the Great Fire, mentions: 1. “The drunkenness and supine negligence of the baker and his servants in whose house it began. 2. The dead time of night wherein it began, when some were wearied with working, others filled with drink, and all in a dead sleep.” The brutality of the people’s amusements continued down to the end of the last century, and later. Thus in Pink’s “History of Clerkenwell,” I find the following advertisement culled from a journal of 1716:--