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HOUSES PERMANENTLY UNFIT FOR HABITATION. 47
registered last year in the City of London generally,
1,410 were at or under seven years of age.
The diseases of these localities are well marked.
Scrofula more or less completely blights all that
are born: often extinguishing life prematurely;
in childhood, by hydrocephalus; in youth by pulmonary
and renal affections, which you read
of as consumption and dropsy; often scarring and
maiming, where it does not kill, and rendering life
miserable by blindness, decrepitude, or deformity;
often prolonging itself as an hereditary curse in
the misbegotten offspring of those, who, under such
unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.
Typhus prevails there too, not as an occasional
visiter, but as an habitual pestilence.
It is impossible for me, by numbers, to give
you an exact knowledge of the fatality of such
spots; because, in the greater part of the City, hospitals,
dispensaries, and private practice, divide the
treatment of the sick with the parochial officers,
and diminish the returns of sickness which those
officers would otherwise have to show. But this I
may tell you, as an illustration of what I state:—
that in the few houses of Seven-Step-alley and its
two offsets, (Amelia-place and Turner-square,)
there occurred last year 163 parochial cases of
fever; in Prince's-place and Prince's-square, 176
cases, (think, Gentlemen, if this had occurred in