And the same is emphatically true of fuel, the main creator of all this activity and of its astonishing results; this necessary of life being now brought to the door of every family in three-fold abundance and at one-half the price at which it could have been obtained at the commencement of the century; while such is the demand for it in various manufactures of vast magnitude, that one trade alone, that of iron, consumes annually eight millions of tons—a trade which immediately and powerfully facilitates the production both of food and of clothing. Thus, like one of Nature’s beautiful adaptations, like that wonderful cycle, for example, in which production, change, and reproduction go on in an unvarying circle, the constant and abundant supply of one main necessary of life furnishes the means of producing the others; while these last are the immediate causes of the abundance of the first. And what a busy hive does this country present at the present time! Out of every thousand males twenty years of age in the kingdom, 836 are directly employed in some active occupation contributing to the national wealth; while the remaining 114 are by no means idle, for they are engaged in some one of the professions. Though the masses have not yet obtained their due share of the wealth they create, and though there is a class which in relation to one essential condition, to be stated immediately, civilization has scarcely reached, or reached only to injure—with these exceptions, no doubt very important ones—the evidence is indubitable that the entire body of society, from its base to its apex, stands on an elevated table-land which many centuries have been employed in raising and consolidating. I have partly proved this by showing the general diffusion of the means of healthful subsistence and the prolongation of life. I am now to prove it by applying these facts to the subject more especially before us, the decline and disappearance of epidemics. It is now exactly two centuries, short of ten years, since the visitation of the Great Plague of 1665—that terrible disease which ravaged England for the space of 1249 years: for it is first heard of in English history in the year 430, and the last year in which its name appears in the Bills of Mortality is 1679; that terrible disease which not only maintained undiminished power over this vast space of time, but which sometimes recurred twenty times in one century—that terrible disease is gone. It cannot be supposed that it has worn itself out, for it still frequently returns with its ancient malignity to Constantinople, Alexandria, Smyrna, and other Eastern States. Petechial or Jail fever, the fatal scourge of the ship, the prison, the hospital, the school, and in short of every place in which any considerable number of persons was assembled, and which when it once broke out was as destructive as the plague—that terrible disease is gone.