The contrast between the mortality of former times and of the present is seen in the mortality of London in 1685 and in 1830. In the first period the deaths were 1 in 23; in the second they were 1 in 45, little more than one-half. Truly therefore has it been said, that the salubrity of London in the nineteenth century and of London in the seventeenth is far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary season and London in the cholera. But still we have had Cholera. In less than a quarter of a century we have had three visitations of this dreadful disease, which exhibits the essential characters of a pestilence of the middle ages; and if Typhus-gravior has disappeared, Typhus and its kindred diseases have taken its place; and the Registrar-General constantly presents before our eyes a faithful record of their ravages. This is too true. We still have epidemics—and why? Because in all our towns there are large portions of the people who live in a state essentially the same as that which existed in the middle ages. The conditions are similar; the results are similar. It is this unhappy class of people that form the exception to the general progress of the nation to which I have adverted. These wretched places and their inhabitants do not obtrude themselves on the public eye. They are not seen in our common thoroughfares, nor in our splendid streets and squares. They are not known. The medical man knows them, the minister of religion knows them, the relieving officer knows them, a few dispensers of voluntary charity know them. They are not known to any one else. Let me then describe one. It is a small room, say twelve feet square; an inner room; no chimney, no window that will open, no inlet for fresh air, no outlet for foul air. There, on a miserable bed, lies a woman ill of typhus fever; a child at her side on the same bed is dying of that fever; a child already dead of it is stretched out on a table at the bed-side. I could not breathe the air of that room. I could not remain in it long enough to write a prescription for the poor patients. As I was writing it at the street-door I shivered and felt sick. I knew that I had taken fever. I passed through a very severe form of it. I could take you to hundreds of such houses in every part of London; to hundreds of courts and lanes wholly consisting of such houses.