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there would be some prospect of extinction. The causes of death are so abundant and'so aggravated In the courts of St. Giles’s, that their population, if left to themselves— if unreplenished—would soon come to an end. The evil would work itself out, and be its own cure. But the population of London is well kcowu to be least local, least stationary, least hereditary in the empire. It Is the sink, if not of nations, at least of the British isles. Considerably more than one third of the whole have actually been born elsewhere, as -appears from the population returns; and as ail thrir families reckon as natives, it is clear that the great majority of the whole two millions is of immediately provincial origin. Everybody may know this from his own acquaintance. The persons for whom building acts and Lord Ashley undertake to provide better houses are not Londoners, but outcasts from the whole empire, and even from all Europe. The human stream sets in from every quarter, and no local measures will ever drain it. You may, perhaps, pump out the lake of Haarlem, or even the Zuyder Zee, but how shall you dry the bed of the Missis si pi at New Orleans, or at the St* Lawrence at Quebec ? From every quarter, far and near, a crowd of applicants presses upon you* They fly from wretchedness in their rear. The only causes to stay this tide of misery are wretched indeed, though it is a melancholy consolation to consider that there are causes which do partially stay it. Death is its final cure, afid misery its preventive. Th;se dismal scenes, lodging houses-with their hundreds, fcaU dozen families in a room, thousands fostering in the closest complication, with moral and physical disease, starvation, and pestilence, drunkenness, debauchery, and blasphemy, do deter in some degree. Many do halt in a career whose termination is so conspicuously: dreadful. ' The horrors of London are not unknown to the rural mind, and have their due effect. They help to make the depths of real poverty more tolerable. Hence wemayseehow little the avail of merely local legis latioo* A metropolitan building act, followed up by a society for providing dwellings in place of those disqualified by the act, evea if those, societies bad statesmen for secretaries and millionaires for subscribers, 4 if-legislation ended there,* would only make the metropolis less repulsive, more attractive, to the whole population of the empire. They would toaly constitute a scheme for the housing comfortably evcry. Irish peasant, and every British labourer,who could not find home or employment in his native village;—than which, we -wiE-venture to say, a more gigantic folly never entered the mind of sms. With two millions already, what is it but mockery to invite more, by offering, in the .very heart of this vast aggregation, comforts almost un-known to the agricultural labourer elsewhere ? It is evident that whatever we do for London we must do for the nadon—nay, rather that it is for more necessary to begin at the root of the evil, at the spring-head of this fearful influx, than at its termination and result. It is better and easier to prevent than to cure.
Newspaper Details
London Bell New Weekly Messenger
London, Middlesex, GB
Sun, Dec 22, 1844
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 18 Jul 2023
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