Edwin Chadwick

“ It is to be hoped that our manufacturers will progress in the gradual and prudent course which is equally removed from stupid and blind adherence to old things, as from the spirit of hasty imitation and the headlong pursuit of novelties. We shall then not have to fear the creation of a dissolute and depraved class of workpeople, as we see in other countries. For the rest, trust to the wise care of our government—trust to the sound sense and excellent disposition of our labourers—and, above all, trust something to the humanity and to the opinions of the manufacturers of Austria themselves. ”

“ In all ages and nations, the burial of the dead has been invested with peculiar sanctity. As the office that closes the visible scene of human existence, it concentrates in itself the most touching exercise of our affections towards objects endeared to us in this life, and the most intense and stirring anxieties that we can feel respecting an invisible state. And, appealing thus to common sympathies of our nature, it has been universally marked by observances intended to give it importance or impressiveness. ”

“ In these wretched habitations everything is sacrificed generally to the rapacity of the proprietor. Every repair which affects the health or the comfort of the tenant merely, and that is not necessary to prevent the total ruin of the dwelling, is entirely neglected. What is the use of cleaning the walls for people whose habits are filthy? Why make windows for the entrance of air and light, or repair a sewer, or cleanse an alley covered with stagnant water, for people who are accustomed to pestilential smells? It is what a proprietor can never understand. ”

“ They agreed, nevertheless, that in all extensive communities, such as ours, circumstances will occur in which an individual, by the failure of his ordinary means of subsistence, will be exposed to the danger of perishing; that to refuse relief, and, at the same time, to punish mendicity, when it cannot be proved that the mendicant could have obtained subsistence by labour, is repugnant to the common sentiments of mankind; that it is repugnant to them to punish even depredation apparently committed as the only resource against want. ”

“ We might ruminate on the beauty which the monuments thus placed must have borrowed from the surrounding images of nature, from the trees, the wild flowers, from a stream running within sight or hearing, from the beaten road, stretching its weary length hard by. Many tender similitudes must these objects have presented to the mind of the traveller, leaning upon one of the tombs, or reposing in the coolness of its shades, whether he had halted from weariness, or in compliance with the invitation, ‘Pause traveller,’ so often found upon the monuments. ”

“ Yes, without doubt, misery is a powerful cause; but it is so especially when it is driven back into the most insalubrious quarters, streets, and houses; when it lives habitually in the midst of filth and dirt, that is to say, in the midst of an infected atmosphere; and when there is no misery, or when it exists in the same degree in the quarters, in the villages, in the streets, and in the houses with which the comparison is made; and, stronger still, when poverty is met with precisely there where there is the least mortality ”

“ To the Irish cottier who may be persuaded to give up the wretched mud hovel, in which the pig has had its stye and its measles, with his children, in-door relief gives him a clean, well-ventilated lodging, a clean bed, and a dietary and condition of existence such as he never before had in his life, and gives him this freely for a moderate return of labour, until he can emigrate, or get labour in the open labour market. The existence of such a refuge relieves him from despair, and gives him courage to adventure far afield for the improved means of independent self-support. ”

“ Something is to be given to custom, something to fame, to nature and to civilities, and to the honour of deceased friends; for that man is esteemed to die miserable for whom no friend or relation sheds a tear, or pays a solemn sigh. I desire to die a dry death, but am not very desirous to have a dry funeral; some flowers sprinkled on my grave would do well and comely ”

“ The man who maintains himself and his family in comfort on 12s. or 14s. of weekly income, possesses what he well deserves, happiness at home, and he stands forth in his neighbourhood a noble example of honest independence. I am persuaded that the filth, fever, and destitution in many families is occasioned, not by their small incomes, but by a misapplication or a prodigal waste of a part, in some cases a great part, of their otherwise sufficient wages. ”

“ Boys clamber up the outside of the wall, hang upon the railing, and, as if tempted by the effect of contrast, take a wanton delight in the noisy utterance of the most familiar, disrespectful, and offensive expressions;—of course, all attempts to put down this nuisance from within the burial ground serve only to aggravate it, and nothing could put it down but a police force ordered to the outside every time that a burial takes place. ”

“ Every noxious circumstance must undoubtedly bear with it the traces of its evil; street riots, mobs of workpeople, and excesses of all kinds, breaches of the law and criminal acts, numerous and open concubinage, large numbers of illegitimate children (in many manufacturing towns amounting to one-fourth of the whole births) , and, lastly, the large numbers of entirely destitute and disabled workpeople who seek for assistance from the parish and from all charities; these are the melancholy signs which mark in England and France the state of the manufacturing population. ”

“ From familiarity it is a short step to desecration. The body, stretched out upon two chairs, is pulled about by the children, made to serve as a resting-place for any article that is in the way, and is not seldom the hiding-place for the beer-bottle or the gin if any visitor arrives inopportunely. Viewed as an outrage upon human feeling, this is bad enough; but who does not see that when the respect for the dead, that is, for the human form in its most awful stage, is gone, the whole mass of social sympathies must be weakened—perhaps blighted and destroyed? ”

“ The scene which these places present at night is one of the most lamentable description; the crowded state of the beds, filled promiscuously with men, women, and children; the floor covered over with the filthy and ragged clothes they have just put off, and with their various bundles and packages, containing all the property they possess, mark the depraved and blunted state of their feelings, and the moral and social disorder which exists. The suffocating stench and heat of the atmosphere are almost intolerable to a person coming from the open air, and plainly indicate its insalubrity. ”

“ A funeral procession through the streets of a great and busy town can scarcely be made impressive. Not even the hearse, in its gorgeous gloom, with all the pomp of heraldry, and followed by the carriages of half the nobility of the land, will arrest for an 153instant the noise and confusion of our streets, or awaken any deeper impression with the mass than idle curiosity. While the poor man, borne on the shoulders of men as poor as himself, is jostled off the pavement; the mourners, at some crossing, are either in danger of being run over or separated from the body ”

“ I perfectly agree that a labouring man will generally be found in a state of greater comfort, holding a tenement from his employer, than when left to provide a dwelling of whatever kind he chooses for himself. In our case the proprietors, in the first place, furnished the house, in which the workmen formed habits of cleanliness and comfort, and when by care and economy he had saved as much as enabled him to purchase it, he was advanced a step higher by becoming himself the proprietor, continuing to occupy part of the house himself, and letting the other parts to his fellow-workmen. ”

“ All the circumstances of the whole number of men whose diseases are there observed, are in many respects exactly alike; they are accurately known to the observer, and are indeed often to a certain degree at his disposal; they are often suddenly changed, and when changed as to one portion of the individuals under observation, they are often unchanged as to another; and therefore the conditions necessary to obtaining an experimentum crucis as to the efficacy of an alleged cause of disease are more frequently in the power of such an observer than of one who is conversant only with civil life. ”

“ The most painful spectacle that is presented in a painful and difficult service is that of a hardworking, industrious labourer, who has lived frugally and saved rigidly, who in his old age is stripped of his savings and reduced to destitution. One such example is enough to destroy the frugality of a whole village, and of all the labourers to whom it is presented. ”

“ No one without personal inspection can form any conception of the dwellings of our workpeople: the neglect in which they live brings evils with it which makes their misery unbearable, indeed almost fatal. Their poverty, by the negligence and demoralization which produces it, becomes almost destructive. In their dark cellars, in their cellar-like rooms, the air is never changed; it is perfectly poisonous. The walls are covered with filth. If a bed is ever found, it is always filthy, and made up of foul and rotten straw. ”

“ Malthus’s original view, “The effect of wars, plagues, and epidemic disorders, those terrible correctives, as they have been justly termed by Dr. Short, of the redundance of mankind on the principle of population, sets its operation in the most striking point of view. These scourges tend to place an old country in the situation of a colony. They lessen the number of inhabitants, without, in most cases, lessening the capital that is to feed and maintain them.” ”

“ I would not aver that an English workman would perform twice the work of a workman of the same class in France, but of this I feel assured, from frequent personal observation of their habits, and from long and confidential intercourse with their intelligent and enlightened manufacturers, that the advantage is more than twofold on the side of England, and that the true result is not to be obtained by comparisons between individuals, or even classes of workmen, but in the comparative aggregate industry of large establishments, or a whole population. ”

“ From your knowledge of the actual state of much of the population in the worst part of the metropolis, derived from your experience in the several local offices you have held, and especially your experience as a superintendent registrar, do you believe that the inspection of the body to verify the fact of death, and, as far as inspection and inquiry on the spot may do so, to determine the cause of death, would be important securities not merely for the truth of the registration, but valuable securities for life itself?—Most certainly I do. ”

“ My duties, as one of the surveyors to a fire-office, call me to all parts of the town, and I am constantly shocked almost beyond endurance at the filth and misery in which a large part of our population are permitted to drag on a diseased and miserable existence. ”

“ The whole of the deformed area stands as a monument of the disasters incurred to the living generation, by a weak and careless yielding, not of the present to the future, but of the present itself, to blind and ignorant impulses, which have entailed immense demoralization, waste of health, and life and money, and a large proportion of the evil which now depresses the sanitary condition of the population of that particular district which his improvements would have covered. ”

“ With the poor, far less obstacles are an absolute barrier, because no privation is felt by them so little as that of cleanliness. The propensity to dirt is so strong, the steps so few and easy, that nothing but the utmost facilities for water can act as a counterpoise; and such is the love of uncleanliness, when once contracted, that no habit, not even drunkenness, is so difficult to eradicate. ”