The result was inevitable. New York gradually became the natural home of every variety of contagious disease, and the favorite resort of foreign pestilences. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria, were domestic pestilences with which the people were so familiar that they regarded them as necessary features of childhood. Malarial fevers, caused by the mosquitoes bred in the marshes, which were perfect culture-beds, were regularly announced in the autumnal months as having appeared with their “usual severity.” The “White Plague,” or consumption, was the common inheritance of the poor and rich alike. With the immigrant, came typhus and typhoid fevers, which resistlessly swept through the tenement houses, decimating the poverty-stricken tenants. At intervals, the great oriental plague, Asiatic cholera, swooped down upon the city with fatal energy and gathered its enormous harvest of dead. Even “Yellow Fever,” the great pestilence of the tropics, made occasional incursions and found a most congenial field for its operations. [Sidenote: Enormous Sacrifice of Life] Failure to improve the unhealthy conditions of the city, and the tendency to aggravate them by a large increase of the tenement-house population, offensive trades, accumulations of domestic waste, and the filth of streets, stables, and privy pits, then universal, caused an enormous sacrifice of life, especially among children. This fact is strikingly illustrated by the following comparison of figures taken from the official records. The standard ratio of deaths to the total living in a community, where the death-rate is normal under proper sanitary conditions, has been fixed by competent authority at about 15 in 1,000 of population. The death-rate in New York, in the five years preceding 1866, averaged 38 in 1,000 population, which is 23 in excess of the normal standard of 15 in the 1,000. In a city with a population of 1,000,000, the estimated population of New York in 1865, a death-rate of 38 in the 1,000 means 23,000 deaths annually from preventable diseases. Mortality statistics computed on a scale of forty years, the period during which New York has been under an intelligent sanitary government, still more impressively show the former waste of life through municipal neglect of the elementary principles of public hygiene. The lesson which these figures teach should be engraven on the memory of every man, woman, and child. Our authority is the annual report of the Department of Health of the City of New York, for the year 1908, in which appears the following statement. “A remarkable decrease in the death-rate has taken place within the past forty years, a decrease comparing each decennial rate with the one immediately preceding represented by seven, seven, and eighteen per cent respectively, and comparing that of the first decennium with the individual year under review, a decrease of forty-seven per cent.” II A GREAT AWAKENING IN ENGLAND