Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: London, Birmingham, and Nottingham, yield an average somewhat below this. If, however, there is reason to fear that the average physique of the English race, in the rapid growth of town populations, has of late years become lowered, there are good grounds for believing that the deterioration has reached its culminating point. Already the results of sanitary improvements in many of our large towns are beginning to declare themselves, not only in a lessened sick-rate and death-rate, but in an apparently healthier tone of public opinion. The working classes in all parts of the country have been bestirring themselves for more leisure and more pay, and so far they have succeeded. It remains to be seen whether the leisure will be spent in self-improvement, or the extra pay be judiciously applied, and not worse than wasted. Savings' banks, Good-Templarism, the present diminution of pauperism and crime, are all of them hopeful signs ; but it must not be forgotton that holidays and high wages may prove to be a curse instead of a blessing, if they are spent in lawless drinking bouts, and not according to the precepts of health and morality. Section III.—Preventable Disease. The remarks in the preceding section, fragmentary though they be, suffice to show that, apart from the mortality and sickness arising from material causes, such as impure air, impure water, or insufficient food, there is a vast amount of preventable disease attributable to social causes, which legislative measures, or ordinary sanitary precautions, do not reach. So far as these causes are concerned, the hopes of progress andimprovement, as already stated, must rest on education wide-spread and general. The fundamental principles of personal and domestic hygiene must become matters of intelligent conviction among...