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60 SOCIAL CONDITION OP THE POOR.
and vagrants,—a class happily not very numerous
in the City; while, modified in the manner I suggest,
it would put under your sanitary regulation
the whole household economy of the permanent industrial
population of the City; and, if effectively
worked, would conduce beyond all estimation to
the physical, social and moral improvement of that
class.
Secondly, Gentlemen, and as a matter of even
higher importance, I would beg you to consider
the incalculable good which may be conferred on
the poorer classes of society, by the direct educational
influence of those in better and more enlightened
circumstances than their own. When I
say that all the social errors to which I now more
particularly refer, would gradually but swiftly
vanish under the influence of education, I do not
mean that the cure would lie in learning to read
and to write and to sum;—though these attainments,
of course, would largely increase the power,
usefulness, and market-value of their possessor.
The education to which I refer, as an all-important
influence for sanitary progress, is that which would
consist in exhibiting to the lowest classes of society
frequent practical evidences of the attainability and
the advantages of higher civilization; an education,
which by model and examples would lead them to
know cleanliness from dirt, decency from grossness,
human propriety from brutish