their old esteemed bathing-quarters, paler and more sickly than when they went, especially as he hears that the place has undergone an entire sanitary overhauling, and been supplied with all the modern requisites of comfort and health. He goes down, and finds the old village, indeed, swept and garnished. The streets, which had a dirtyish gutter on either side, and were in all parts to be trodden with caution, are as clean as the pavement of Amsterdam. Certain objects which he used to denounce as remnants of barbarism, have disappeared, having been superseded by hydraulic mechanism else where. So much for the land; but now for the water. He finds that between half and full tide-the most convenient condition for bathingit is impregnated with a heavy percentage of that abominable fluid which bears the newly-invented name of sewage. He discovers that the mouth of the main trunk sewer, lying at low tide like a long cannon on the sand, was the place which his children generally selected for their sports. He wonders no more at their condition, but returns, meditating on the sad fate of all efforts at human amelioration to encounter reaction, and agreeing, with Byron, that man is an unfortunate devil, and ever will be." Punch got hold of this new salt-water grievance, and gave us a representation of the bathing-master directing the attendant to put "the gent as wants to be tuck in deep, into the drain."

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The sea, no doubt, is deep and broad; but we have yet to know how far it may be contaminated should we cast into it the great mass of impurities which have heretofore gone to fertilise the land. The partial ejections, caused by the recent progress of sanitary improvment, begin to give us warning. A hundred years ago it would have been thought as absurd to speak of the great volume of water in the tidal reaches of the Thames being polluted, as it may now be thought to speak of a similar danger to our estuaries and sandy bays. But the effects of the drainage of Glasgow-imperfect as it is--may be perceived at Dumbarton; and were the

impurities of that enormous city, along with those of Paisley and Greenock, and of the many manufacturing villages in the basin of the Clyde, received into the Firth by a perfect system of drainage on the best scientific principles, we doubt not that the abomination would be found on the rocky borders of Loch Goyle, and in the beautiful sinuosities of the Kyles of Bute. Adepts tell us that the impurities cast into the sea nourish seaweeds; that these nourish birds, and the birds deposit guano, which is brought to fertilise our fields; so that in reality what is sent forth comes back to us. It may be so, but the process is somewhat circuitous, and the immediate results of it are not desirable. Suppose the whole world, or all that part of it sufficiently near the shore, to follow the example which some of our towns have set, and discharge their refuse into the sea; the result we leave to greater philosophers and better calculators.

Here, then, is the plain state of the case. The changes in our domestic and municipal habits, so rapidly brought about, have reacted in evils which it requires farther changes, and these of a comprehensive and powerful character, to counteract. But let us not despair. The next stage of progress will, beyond doubt, be carried out. It is the nature of such things always to be completed by the practical, persevering people who inhabit our island; and when the final result is satisfactorily achieved, we shall perhaps be better able to appreciate the true amount of enlightened philanthropy and practical sagacity developed in the operations which have carried us thus far. No doubt, during the twenty years in which sanitary science has been in vogue and in action, it has developed vain enthusiasm here, and self-sufficient pedantry there. Many a one idea has been brought forward to solve all the difficulties of the achievement, and has been found worthless for meeting the smallest of them. Many a scheme, promising the best results in theory, has broken down in action; and many a foolish conflict has been fought between men, each working for the world's good, and each ad

cadaverous aspect, have attended as witnesses to attest their own perfectly sound condition, as evidence of the salubrity of their own particular occupations. Generally, however, men with robust figures, and the hue of health, are singled out, and presented as examples of the general innocuousness of the offensive miasma generated in the process in which they are engaged. Professor Owen mentions an instance of a witness of this class, a very robust man, the keeper of a dissecting room, who appeared to be in florid health (which, however, proved not to be so sound as he himself conceived), who professed perfect unconsciousness of having sustained any injury from the occupation, and there was no reason to doubt that he really was unconscious of having sustained or observed any; but it turned out, on inquiry, that he had always had the most offensive and dangerous work done by an inferior assistant; and that within his time he had had no less than eight assistants, and that every one had died, and some of these had been dissected in the theatre where they had served;"-a proper doom of poetical justice to the accessories of a man who was making himself a living testimony against sound Chadwickian principles.

In dealing with one so armed, there was nothing for it but to yield at once, or carry on a deadly conflict. Thus, for a time, Mr Chadwick had a deal of his own way; and his way affected measures of large moment to the empire. His influence moulded the tone and tenor of the English Poor-Law Act of 1844-the great Act which revolutionised the condition of the rural labourers. No one did more to bring about the general system of police which is now coming into operation throughout the empire. Lastly, he was the parent and author of the Board of Health and of the whole sanitary legislation of the country, including those enrolments under the Public Health Act which have provided a sanitary police for several towns in England, the number of which is annually increasing. At last, however, when seemingly in the midst of his labours and at the height of his power, the British pub

lic found that they could endure him no longer, and he was cast down_by a sort of general ostracism. His mind was, in fact, not constituted for the British people and the British constitution. He could not give and take as our public men do-losing a point to-day, and expecting to gain an equivalent to-morrow-yielding here, and compromising there, and admitting, even when beaten, that the other side may have some good in it. Nothing that ever differed in the faintest degree from Mr Chadwick's well-weighed and carefullyadjusted conclusions could ever seem to his eyes to have any good in it. He was driven by an ergoism, as the French call it, to adopt logical conclusions which were infallible, and must break through all obstacles. Hence there was an autocratism about him which the people of this country will bear neither from rank nor wealth, and which they showed in his case that they will not bear from talent. Admitting the evils of laziness and dirtiness, they asserted the abstract right to be lazy and dirty when they pleased. pleased. Perhaps the Potemkins, Pombals, and Hardenbergs, who have produced so much influence in despotic countries, have been men of such a mould. What influence such a man might have if he secured the ear of one of the great imperial rulers of Europe, it would be hard to say. Instead of a continued chafing with lukewarm friends and determined enemies, bis schemes might then have been carried out with the rapidity of military commands-whether with as much fundamental effect on the people as the projects of benevofence which are discussed, criticised, lopped, and twisted, before they pass into Acts of Parliament with us, let historical and ethical philosophers decide. It is enough that our people, whether from their reasonableness or their unreasonableness, became suspicious when they saw that whatever public office Mr Chadwick was attached to, drew into itself gradually, as it were by some magnetic attraction, all other business, public and private. When he was at the Poor-Law Board, he found poverty intimately associated on the one side with crime; and

this brought within his supervisance the system of police, and the administration of criminal justice generally. On the other side, he found that disease and death were great sources of poverty; and this opened up to him the field in which his services have been most signal and successful. But even while he was pursuing with all vigour the work of sanitary reform, he must needs follow up collateral projects of organisation so various and so distant from his proper field, as to show a disposition to aggregate within his own control the nation's business, and that of every man in it. Through the necessity of superseding the overcrowded graveyards in towns, and the opening of extra mural cemeteries, he found his way to the supervisance of funerals as a public function of his department, and the consequent abolition of undertakers, much to the indignation and amazement of these sable functionaries, who told a sympathising and slightlyalarmed audience that this was but a beginning of interference with private enterprise, which might gradually absorb one trade after another into the Government departments, to end-who knows where? He was far too great an artist to announce his design in anything like the abrupt manner in which it is here spoken of. He first pointed to the solemn associations and sanctified repose that should naturally surround the ancestral burial-place, whether it were in the vaults of some grand old church, or the green sod beneath the yew trees, where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. He showed how utterly all this had departed from the modern city graveyards, where the narrow house is sold by mercenary dealers, stimulated by competition, at an enormous price. The last ceremony is performed close to a crowded street rattling with omnibuses, which sends in a detachment of its idle boys to criticise, in their peculiar ribald fashion, the conduct and costume of the mourners, who are in the end pestered by drunken attendants for perquisites to be spent in the neighbouring gin-shop. For all this it is

possible to substitute the quiet seclusion of a cemetery among trees, where the last rites may be performed with due decorum, while the more important object is accomplished of closing city graveyards, rendered pestilential by saturisation. So far the reports on interments in towns led to changes which, though they may not have entirely accomplished all that their propounder had in view, have been eminently beneficial. But he did not stop at this point. The removal of the dead beyond the city should be performed with due decorum and solemnity-a proposi tion readily acceded to. But the poor could ill afford this sacrifice to sanitary improvement, and some arrangement should be made to economise it. And since there must be official intervention, why not look into the whole system of undertakers' work and charges, and see what they are? So comes a statement of facile, meaningless expenditure on the one hand, and mercenary exaction on the other, which probably has been of use in keeping down undertakers' bills, though it has not transferred their function to the State. It was so skilfully presented that people at first sight overlooked its general bearing on trade and freedom of action, and forgot that, if extravagance and overcharges were a reason for putting down private enterprise, there were few of the ordinary transactions of life that could escape. A reactionary cry at length arose against this system of aggressive interference and its author. country gave him a thousand a-year in consideration of his past services, and on condition of his abstaining from more. Deprived of the means of activity, he was not, however, restrained in freedom of speech. He has been talking on various matters, not without effect; and the last creation of his fertile brain is the competitive system of examination for office-a project which, perhaps more than any other, reveals the fundamental system of his policy: it is in practice what the political department of Comte's philosophy of the positive is in theory-a sort of noocracy or despotism of intellect,

The

where power is to be held, not by the tenure of hereditary rank or of popular will, but according to cleverness-the cleverest, and we all know who that is-ruling over all.

The chief service achieved by this remarkable man is still embodied in the "Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain," issued in 1812. The shape in which it appeared is characteristic. The Poor Law Commissioners, as a body, were authorised to make the inquiry and the report, but they presented a report prepared solely by their secretary, Mr Chadwick. Having been called on to put their names to a document full of startling novelties, they, like honest men, left the credit or the failure, whatever it might be, to the man who had prepared it. This remarkable paper-heavy and diffuse as a literary production-starts, if it does not exhaust, every point on which the sanitary school have written, in blue-books and other books, in pamphlets and articles, during the sixteen years since it came forth. The latest official document, called Papers relating to the Sanitary state of the People of England," by Dr Greenhow and Dr Simon the medical officer of the Board of Health, if it present some new and minute varieties, only goes over the old ground. In both documents the main points of instruction are, that a large amount of the mortality in this country arises from causes which are preventible; that if a portion of these are preventible only at our own individual will, there are others of a kind which can be removed by public measures; that the difference in the rate of mortality in different places is caused by the removal of the noxious causes in the places where it is low, and their existence in the places where it is high; that, experimentally, vitality has been increased in given instances by the removal of noxious agencies; that there is benefit not only to the families and the persons whose health is improved by such measures, but to the State collectively, because the pressure of population is increased instead of being lessened by pre

mature deaths; that a population among whom health is unsound and life uncertain, are apt to prove depraved and dangerous; that, in particular, the premature deaths of working heads of families leave an amount of widowhood and orphanage to be parochially provided for, which would not be left if the men had lived to see their children at maturity; and that, finally, when the human being reaches the assigned natural span of life, he departs, leaving his functions in the hands of the new generation matured and fit for their performance; while everything that shortens this span, disturbs the order of the world, and causes evils which, so far as practicable, should be removed. At the same time, the practical arrangements laid down in this comprehensive document are so far from being superseded, that even the plan for draining London is but a variation-whether an improvement or not, let the wise decide-on arrangements for the same purpose suggested in the Sanitary Report.

Indeed, a recurrence to that document by any one who has in his eye the present condition of our great towns, must force on him an unpleasant contrast between the much that has been said and the little that has been done in the direction of sanitary reformation during sixteen years. Let us hope that in the end all this preaching will tend to practice, and that in the mean time it is not lost.

Perhaps the greatest boon which the promoters of sanitary science have done to the world, is in the exposition of the blessings which sanitary organisation is capable of communicating to the poorer and the more helpless classes, without in any way interfering with their freedom, or undermining that proper self-reliance which the management of their own affairs imparts to them. In fact, the larger proportion of the advantage which they would derive from methods of external purification, instead of proving a new interference with private rights or conduct, would virtually relieve them from unjust and cruel acts of interference or restriction. It is a fact which calls loudly for more interference in their behalf, that even