Again, it will naturally be supposed that the free use of liquor in Montreal is a principal cause of its extreme mortality; the Catholic rural population being peculiarly sober in their habits. How great is the effect of drinking on health, the two following classes of facts will testify. The first is from an analysis of the books of eleven Sick Clubs in the town of Preston, Lancashire, of which 8 were open to all, and three were restricted to teetotalers. They are each corrected to a scale of 1,000 members. Number of Average time/Total weeks Cost to members sick. of sickness. Average of Preston sick. the Club. The second is extracted from the "Journal de Société de la Morale Chretienne" for Aug. 1847. The testimony is very accurately ascertained, and gives a comparison of strong country labourers where liquor was distributed, with sickly inhabitants of towns where the drink money was expended on better food. Both parties were employed on government work. In the country districts of Holstein, Mecklembourg, Oldenbourg, and Hanôvre, where drink was given, out of 20,952 labourers employed, 472 became sick, or one out of every 44. Whereas out of 7107 labourers from the towns of Brunswick, Oldenbourg, and the Hanseboroughs, to whom drink was not supplied, there were only 70 sick, or one out of every 90. But the deaths in towns do not so much result directly from drinking, as is shown by comparing Montreal with Toronto and Ottawa, where drinking was just as much followed, and yet the mortality continued low. The usual effect of liquor is to weaken the constitution of its votaries, and thus render them an easy prey to the various forms of town disease, which abstainers are frequently able to avoid or at least to throw off. The early exposure of infants by Catholic parents, for baptismal purposes, has also been assigned as a cause for the extreme mortality of Montreal. But this cause will affect, to an equal or even greater extent, the adjacent or rural districts; whereas, out of every 100 deaths in Montreal, 43 are of children under 5 years of age; in the country only 37: while in the Protestant cities of Upper Canada, the mortality is much greater, varying from 47 to 56. In England the fourth column of the original table furnishes a very exact guide to the amount of preventible mortality. In Canada there appear anomalies which would perhaps be explained by an average of many years. Such is the enormous infantile mortality of Quebec, amounting to 69 out of every 100 in 1851. The same may be said with respect to the last column, which represents the percentage of deaths arising from "xymotic" or air-poison diseases, which, though generated even in country places, are peculiarly destructive in towns, where they are not instantly diluted with fresh air. In England, out of every million persons living in the country, 3,422 die every year of these diseases; while of the same number living in towns, 6013, or nearly double the number, die from the same causes. The returns for Canada, however, will have to be corrected by an average of years; for we find healthy Hamilton losing half of its total number from these diseases, while Montreal loses only 15, and Kingston, with less than half its mortality, only 8. The town-smells, therefore, have other ways of killing-off those who inhale them than by infectious complaints, and this they do, in general, by the gradual weakening of the constitution, through which the system is unable to bear up against whatever disease happens to attack the sufferer. It appears, therefore, by comparing the averages of Montreal and its adjacent districts, even leaving out the fever year, that there are 21 deaths in every thousand persons which might yearly be prevented; that is, on the present population of (say) 65,000 inhabitants, the people of Montreal kill-off thirteen hundred and sixty-five of their own flesh and blood every year, who would not die did they only pay as much attention to health in the city as they do in the country; to say nothing of hundreds of lives more which country and towns' people alike sacrifice on the altar of self-indulgence and "laissez-faire." But this is not all. From the returns of the Manchester Dispensaries, it appears that to every case of death there are 28 cases of sickness. These, on the average of the Preston Sick Clubs, last 5 weeks each. Therefore the people of Montreal voluntarily tax their health to the extent of 38,220 cases of sickness every year, which is equal to a loss of 191,100 weeks, or 2,674 years; that amount requiring to be taken twice over, once for the suffering invalid and again for the anxious nurse. Nor is this the whole of the evil. There is a large amount of general enfeeblement of health, which does not develope into actual disease. This brings misery on the daily life, urges to the use of poisonous stimulants, often leads to recklessness of conduct, destroys the desire and even the power of amendment, and works corruption throughout the whole fabric of society. 1 To the work of palliating or curing diseases, 25 physicians or other medical men honourably devote their lives, and are thankfully supported by the inhabitants, along with 15 vendors of drugs; in all, an apparatus of 40 persons devoting their energies to restoration, besides large numbers of Hospital attendants, Sisters of Charity, and other nurses employed in tending the sick. But to this day the city of Montreal does not employ a single officer of health to detect the causes of preventable disease, nor does she make it a requirement in the men she elects to her Municipal Council, that they should enforce those sanitary regulations which the law empowers them to carry out. The limits and scope of this paper do not allow me to point out the special causes of this extreme mortality, nor the means required for their removal. It may be sufficient to place on record an account of a court in the Petite Rue St. Antoine, which I visited in April last in company with a Domestic Missionary. It was by no means so bad as many parts of the Griffintown suburbs. It is to be hoped that the time will soon come when this description will be as great an antiquarian curiosity as the "plague-stone" in the Warrington Museum, in a hollow of which the money was passed through vinegar to prevent transmission of infection. We left the street through a covered passage, treading on bricks and pieces of wood through a mass of wet and decomposing manure and filth. Reaching thus the small back-yard, we found it to consist apparently of a widely-extended midden, consisting of disgusting slutch and every kind of refuse, from a few inches to some feet in thickness. On two sides, this yard was separated from two similar ones by partition fences; on the other two it was enclosed by dwellings. The inner house, or rather hovel, was divided into two; the two little rooms upstairs, inhabited by a French family at a rent of $4 a month; those below by two families, paying $3.50 for the liberty of being poisoned. The miserable rooms not only got no air but what was charged with the stenches of the yard, but just outside were several privies, too disgustingly filthy to be used, but breeding "nast" to soak through the wooden walls and floor of the inner room. This was filled by a family, where of course there was sickness; with closed door and window, so that no air entered but what was saturated with fever-stenches. For the upper rooms of the cottage opposite, $8 a month were paid. On descending the stairs to reach the street, we had to cro s over fluid matter, stepping on bricks. The lower story, for which $6 are generally paid, was now necessarily empty, being flooded, I will not say with water, but with liquid manure, the disgusting emanations from which ascend through the stair case and between the boards, into the upper story. It was by wading on bricks through this mass of pollution that the tenant had to obtain her supply of water; this being the one only health-spot in the whole, where the pipe, rising through the foetid drainage of the court, discharges the pure water of the Ottawa for the pallid occupants. The upper tenants had been there for 15 months, and assured me that the yard had never been cleaned during the whole time. And yet the authorities, who confiscate unwholesome meat when offered in the shambles, allow the use of these unwholesome dens to be freely sold to those whose ignorance or poverty keeps them from remonstrance; and men are found willing to draw $21.50 a month, as payment for the privilege of inhaling poison, in places where no right-thinking man would keep his horse, scarcely his pig; and where he would not live himself (or rather die) for any amount of money. During the long months of winter, all injurious emanations are happily frozen up, like the fabled tunes blown into Munchausen's horn. But when the spring thaw comes, the whole mass of corruption, which has been accumulating on the surface and among the snow, is set free; not only sinking into the unpaved back yards, and there laying by a deep store of pollution to rise up at the bidding of the summer sun, in the form of fever or cholera; but running into and around the dwellings, soaking into the floors, and sponged up by the timber walls, where the reeking colour, premonitory of disease, is hidden behind some tawdry paper; and the heedless victim of ignorance, generally also of intemperance, hires the poisoned coffin in which his wife and little ones are constrained to dwell. In the more healthy parts of the city, the winter manure is dislodged by the melting snow and precipitated on the solid matter. As the streets rapidly dry, fine dust is formed in immense masses; and while the poor below are wading on bricks through the liquid stench bowls, the gentry are inhaling similar pollutions in the form of impalpable and perceptible dust. It is evident that both * The myriads of flies of which the inhabitants complain, are the necessary result of the putrid refuse. In the present state of the city, they act as nature's scavangers, and should be reckoned among the greatest blessings. streets and yards should be cleared as soon as ever the substance is soft enough to be removed; that the liquid manure, instead of running to waste in the river, should be employed to fertilize the land; that all back yards not used for cultivation, should be paved with brick or stone; that houses should be drained with some other material than wooden troughs; that the plan of fixing frame houses on wooden legs over swamps should be expressly prevented; and that a complete system of sewerage should be provided for the poorer, far more than even for the wealthier portions of the community. The mere fact of sewering and cleansing 20 streets in Manches ter, inhabited by 3,500 persons, reduced the mortality from 31 to 25 per 1,000; that is, prevented 21 deaths and 588 cases of sickness in 7 months. In Windmill Court, London, there were 41 cases of sickness in 7 months. The landlord paved and sewered it, and supplied it with water; and in the same space of time afterwards, there were only 2 cases. He did it at his own expense, and "made a good thing of it."-When the Manchester Council swept their streets by machine every day, they found that the roads scarcely ever needed repair. In Aberdeen and Perth, the expense of the similar daily cleansing was more than covered by the sale of the manure. What is poison to man is food to the plant. One pound of urine contains all the elements necessary for one pound of wheat. The focal matter of two adults is sufficient manure to raise an acre of corn or pease; or that of one man will produce an acre of turnips, if the green matter is returned to the soil. The value of manure in Flanders is $9.25 per man. Land near Edinburgh, which used to let for only $15 per acre, now fetches from $100 to $200 per annum, simply from being irrigated with town refuse. And in the town of Rugby, the system of drainage is so complete that whatever is deposited in the dwelling in the morning, by noon is spread over the fields in a minute state of division, before decomposition has time to develope its poisonous stench. As the cost of sanitary measures is generally the greatest obstacle to their adoption, it may be well to inquire whether their neglect is not still more costly. The following is an attempt to exhibit the |