The noxious agencies not only impair the strength of the labouring community, but, as will be further shown, they tend also to shorten the period of its exercise. This effect will be more apparent when considering merely the pecuniary burdens of the excess of orphanage and premature widowhood, apart from the loss of protection and the misery which it causes. I shall here only observe, as to the depressing effects assumed from the admitted tendencies of an increase of population, that the fact is, that hitherto, in England, wages, or the means of obtaining the necessaries of life for the whole mass of the labouring community, have advanced, and the comforts within the reach of the labouring classes have increased with the late increase of population. This may be verified by reference to various evidence, and amongst others to that contained in Sir F. Eden’s examinations of the wages and modes of subsistence of the agricultural labourers in his day, and we have evidence of this advance even in many of the manufacturing districts now in a state of severe depression. For example, an eminent manufacturer in Lancashire, stated to me in November ultimo—“That the same yarn which cost my father 12_d._ per lb. to make in 1792, all by machinery, now costs only 2_d._ per lb.; paying _then_ only 4_s._ 4_d._ per hand wages weekly, _now_ 8_s._ 8_d._ or more; yet those wages amounted _then_ to 5½_d._ per lb., and notwithstanding the higher wages, _now_, to only 1_d._ per lb.” The prices of provisions were, during the first period, as high as now, and the cost of clothing 30 or 40 per cent. higher. V.—PECUNIARY BURDENS CREATED BY THE NEGLECT OF SANITARY MEASURES. The more closely the subject of the evils affecting the sanitary condition of the labouring population is investigated the more widely do their effects appear to be ramified. The pecuniary cost of noxious agencies is measured by data within the province of the actuary, by the charges attendant on the reduced duration of life, and the reduction of the periods of working ability or production by sickness; the cost would include also much of the public charge of attendant vice and crime which come within the province of the police, as well as the destitution which comes within the province of the administrators of relief. Of the pecuniary effects, including the cost of maintenance during the preventible sickness, any estimate approximating to exactness could only be obtained by very great labour, which does not appear to be necessary.