"The great difficulty of obtaining lodgment for the working classes has caused overcrowding of the poor in an unprecedented manner, and consequently the development of typhus which is considered to be bred in the pestilential atmosphere of overcrowded dwellings."[93] Overcrowding led to numerous, indeed to all sorts and kinds of diseases. The Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras wrote:-- "It has been shown that consumption and the so-called tubercular diseases are developed by want of pure air more than by any other cause." And not alone did the overcrowding lead to disease, but it rendered it difficult if not impossible to check disease. "How is it possible," wrote one of them, "to prevent the spread and fatality of fever and whooping-cough when six or seven persons are shut up in one small room breathing the same air loaded with zymotic poison over and over again? "The danger of allowing a deadly atmosphere to be engendered by the crowding together of persons in a small room without sufficient ventilation is unfortunately not confined to the inmates of that particular room, but those diseases which are therein generated extend far beyond its immediate vicinity, and under some circumstances a large portion of a district will suffer in consequence."[94] Dr. Rendle, previously Medical Officer of Health for St. George-the-Martyr, in his evidence[95] before a Select Committee in 1866, said:-- "... The overcrowding exists to such an extent that the poor cannot by any possibility do other than breed disease, and when they breed it they give it to others." Lord Shaftesbury said:-- "As to the effects of all this overcrowding, can anything be more prejudicial to the human system than the filthy squalor, the foetid air, and depressing influences of these dwellings? "When you ask why so many of the working men betake themselves to the ale-house or gin-palace, the answer lies in the detestable state of their homes. "I have had it from hundreds of both women and men that this cause, and this cause alone, has driven them to the use of ardent spirits.... Nine-tenths of our poverty, misery, and crime, are produced by habits of intoxication, and I trace those habits, not altogether, but mainly, to the pestilential and ruinous domiciliary condition of the great mass of the population of this metropolis and the large towns of the country."[96] "No bodily labour induces an exhaustion of the vital powers comparable to that resulting from the habitual breathing of air contaminated by the overcrowding of human beings."[97] For children born under such circumstances of overcrowding and filth, and in such insanitary surroundings, birth was mostly followed by an early death. "Infancy in London has to creep into life in the midst of foes," as the _Times_ truly remarked in 1861.