Edwin Chadwick

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus one individual is enabled to exercise a despotic caprice against the health and prosperity of the surrounding population, to inflict an extensive loss of labour and wages on the working man, the loss of produce and profit to the occupiers, the loss of rent to the other owners, and at the same time to inflict on all who may live on the spot, or come within reach of the marsh, the ill health and hazards of disease from the miasma which it emits! ”

“ It is a monument of this last kind of which the council ventures to suggest the erection, in demanding a law to regulate the construction of towns, villages, and houses, under the double relation of public and private 415health; a monumental law, if ever there was one, since it will embrace France in its conceptions; all the citizens will enjoy its benefits with a perfect equality; and the poor man, even more than the rich, will find himself protected by it in his health, in his life, in his happiness; because health is life—it is more, it is happiness. ”

“ This is the more to be regretted, that the beautiful state of cleanliness of the new part of Ayr, shows with how little labour it might be obviated with the aid of our absorbent soil and free atmosphere. There are some streets, the main street of Newton in particular, which have such inequalities in the causewayed footpaths, and such want of escape by the gutters, that it is impossible to find one’s way through them in a dark night, without many a plunge into the filth. There is everywhere sufficient slope toward the river to render drainage perfectly effectual, if properly executed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As there is a poverty that is self-inflicted, and may be self-removed, so there is a certain amount of disease and annual mortality in every city that is self-inflicted; and the community that does not strive, by every available means, to reduce its disease and mortality bills to the lowest sum of human suffering, and the lowest rate of annual mortality, is as guilty of suicide as the individual who, Judas like, takes with his own hands the life God has given, and hurries unbidden into the presence of his Judge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Without the slightest objection to the legal obligation, the moral degradation is such that marriage is accounted a superfluous ceremony, not worth the payment of the necessary fees; and on one occasion, when it was given out that these would be dispensed with, upwards of 50 persons from Avon-street, who had lived together for years, voluntarily came forward to enter into a union. And thus it invariably happens in crowded haunts of sin and filth, where principle is obliterated, and where public opinion, which so often operates in the place of principle, is never heard ”

“ Spirit shops, beer shops, and low eating houses abound. The gloom of these shops, joined to the repulsive physiognomy of the streets, infuse a secret horror into the visitor who is led there by the spirit of observation, and who knows that the greater part of the shops are the habitual resort of the lowest prostitutes, and of rogues that live in the neighbourhood. The lodgings and places of dissipation frequented by this part of the population are worthy, from their filth, of the streets and quarters in which they are situated. ”

“ I consider the lodging-shops more injurious to the health of the miners than their work itself. So many sleeping in the same room, so many breaths, so much stour arising from their working-clothes, so much perspiration from the men themselves, it is impossible to be comfortable. Two miners occupy one bed, sometimes three. The beds are shaken once a-week on the Monday morning, when the miners come. Some miners make their beds every night. ”

“ Since the use of gas for lighting, several accidents have happened. Are they not due, for the most part, to the want of precaution in the directors of these manufactories, who have not sufficiently prescribed to their men the necessary measures of prevention? Should they not all know that one must not run with a candle into a place where there is a stream of gas, as one would go in search of a stream of water? It is this imprudence which commonly occasions the explosions that happen, and which are ordinarily followed by the gravest accidents. ”

“ Employers’ Influence on the Health of Workpeople by the Ventilation of Places of Work, and the Prevention of Noxious Fumes, Dust, &c. In some of the “dusty trades,” the excessive amount of premature mortality is so great as to justify interference, defensively, as against the charges which, from the neglect of sanitary measures, fall neither upon the employer nor upon the consumer, who directly benefit by the produce of the industry, but upon ratepayers, to whom the manufactory itself may be a nuisance. ”

“ What do you believe would be the consequence of too large allotments of land being made to the labourers?—That the poor man could not cultivate it. The wealth of his employer is the poor man’s safeguard against want. I approve of the practice of a benevolent farmer in my parish, who is accustomed to give to his labourers a headland of his field as a bonus to industry. He says he will make it worth the while of his labourers to be honest and diligent towards him, by letting them feel that they will have a suitable return from him. ”

“ 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. ”