[59] I purposely refrain from any attempt to illustrate all the horrors which are incidental to this method of life; but, as a single exemplification of the text (chosen, not because of its rarity, but because it happens to occur at the moment) I insert an extract from a note, with which I was favoured a fortnight ago, by Mr. Hutchinson, Surgeon to the North District of the West London Union: ‘I was sent for to attend a poor Irish woman in labour, at half-past six o’clock yesterday morning, at 17, Fox and Knot court. There were three families, each consisting of a man and wife and two or more children, in a small room, 15 feet by 8, all lying upon dirty rags on the floor. I found one of the children suffering under small-pox. The adjoining room was occupied by six grown-up persons and two children.’ In the circumstances to which my Report refers, scenes of this description must of necessity be _habitual_: and it is to their habit, not to their exceptional occurrence, that my remarks apply. Who can wonder at what becomes, physically or morally, of infants begotten and born in these bestial crowds? In my former Report, I drew your attention to this pestilential heaping of human beings, and suggested to you its results; and on many occasions, during the past year, complaints have been before your Hon. Court which have had their real origin in this uncontrolled evil. I revert to it because of its infinite importance. While it maintains physical filth that is indescribable, while it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, while it creates mortality enough to mask the results of all your sanitary progress, its moral consequences are too dreadful to be detailed. I have to deal with the matter only as it relates to bodily health. Whatever is morally hideous and savage in the scene--whatever contrast it offers to the superficial magnificence of the metropolis--whatever profligacy it implies and continues--whatever recklessness and obscene brutality arise from it--whatever deep injury it inflicts on the community--whatever debasement or abolition of God’s image in men’s hearts is tokened by it--these matters belong not to my office, nor would it become me to dwell on them. Only because of the physical sufferings am I entitled to speak; only because pestilence is for ever within the circle; only because Death so largely comforts these poor orphans of civilisation. To my duty it alone belongs, in such respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this--a curtain which propriety might gladly leave unraised, you cannot but see that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence; blighting the moral existence of a rising population; rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous; and scattering, while society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism.