M. Mallet observes, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the different causes, and the different degrees of intensity of each of the causes that have tended to produce this result. It is, however, attributed generally to the advance in the condition of all classes; to the medical science of the public health being better understood and applied; to larger and better and cleaner dwellings; more abundant and healthy food; the cessation of the great epidemics which, from time to time, decimated the population; the precautions taken against famine; and better regulated public and private life. As an instance of the effects of regimen in the preservation of life, he mentions that, in an establishment for the care of female orphans taken from the poorest classes, out of 86 reared in 24 years, one only had died These orphans were taken from the poor. The average mortality on the whole population would have been six times as great.[23] An impression of an undefined optimism is frequently entertained by persons who are aware of the wretched condition of a large portion of the labouring population; and this impression is more frequently entertained than expressed, as the ground of inaction for the relief of the prevalent misery from disease, that its ravages form the natural or positive check, or, as Dr. Short terms it, a “terrible corrective” to the pressure of population on the means of subsistence. In the most crowded districts, which have been the subject of the present inquiry, the facts do not justify this impression; they show that the theory is inapplicable to the present circumstances of the population. How erroneous the inferences are in their unrestrained generality, which assume that the poverty or the privation which is sometimes the consequence,—is always the cause, of the disease, will have been seen from such evidence as that adduced from Glasgow and Spitalfields, proving that the greater proportion of those attacked by disease are in full work at the time; and the evidence from the fever hospitals, that the greatest proportion of the patients are received in high bodily condition. If wages be taken as the test of the means of subsistence, it may be asked how are such facts to be reconciled as these, that at a time when wages in Manchester were 10s. per head weekly on all employed in the manufactories, including children or young persons in the average, so that if three or four members of a family were employed, the wages of a family would be 30_s._ or 40_s._ weekly, the average chances of life to all of the labouring classes were only 17 years; whilst in the whole of Rutlandshire, where the wages were certainly not one half that amount, we find the mean chances of life to every individual of the lowest class were 37 years? Or, to take another instance, that whilst in Leeds, where, according to Mr. Baker’s report, the wages of the families of the worst-conditioned workers were upwards