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MORTALITY OP THE CITY OP LONDON. 7
healthiest districts of each region remain utterly
unharmed in presence of the pestilence. Compare,
for instance, the cholera mortality in a healthy
suburban sub-district with that of an unhealthy
urban one. Dulwich and the parish of St. Ann's,
Blackfriars, in the City of London, are probably
nearly equal in population: in the former, there
was not a single death from cholera; in the latter,
the deaths from this cause alone were at the rate
of twenty-five to every thousand of the population.
Dulwich is one of the healthiest sub-districts within
the bills of mortality ; St. Ann's belongs to one of
the unhealthiest sub-districts of the City of London
; and the cholera visited each in proportion to
its ordinary healthiness.
Such is the general rule; and accordingly I
would suggest to you that the presence of epidemic
cholera, instead of serving to explain away
the local inequalities of mortality, does, in fact,
only constitute a most important additional testimony
to the salubrity or insalubrity of a district,
and renders more evident a disparity of circumstances
which was previously decided. The frightful
phenomenon of a periodic pestilence belongs
only to defective sanitary arrangements; and, in
comparing one local death-rate with another, it is
requisite to remember that, in addition to the
ordinary redundance of deaths which marks an
unhealthy district, there is a tendency from time
to time to the recurrence of epidemic pestilence,