Excerpt from Healthy Houses: A Handbook to the History, Defects, and Remedies of Drainage, Ventilation, Warming, and Kindred Subjects, With Estimates for the Best Systems in Use, and Upward of Three Hundred Illustrations

AT length the sanitary Day is dawning. Men are not to do as they choose with their neighbours' lives. They are to be restrained from committing suicide by setting at defiance all the laws of Health. Science is to triumph and, whilst we cannot be sanguine as to the present generation reaping many of the benefits promised us by the Legislature, nevertheless the accurate knowledge gained respecting the essence of contagion and the skill displayed in innumerable ways in devising life-protecting plans in every part of the British Isles, cannot fail, in the long run, materially to add to the comfort and prosperity of the people, and to lower the rate of mortality. In past ages men experienced the evils of various stages of transition - from the pastoral state, when a few had to brave in rude health the danger of unrestrained and uncultivated nature, to the first traces of commerce, when they combined and travelled for long distances, and, dispersing in bodies, propagated disease as they roamed about, in a manner still common at the present day in Eastern countries. From step to step we have been led to face the difficulties of protecting human life where the largest number had to be fed, housed, educated, amused, enriched, and all in the smallest possible space. N ow our large cities are to be rendered safer and healthier than the sparse villages of former times. We do npt expect to prolong human life beyond the allotted Span, but the largest number possible must attain three Score and ten. They are to be protected from baby-farmers and measles, ricketts and consumption, sewer gases and cholera.

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