EVILS OF DENSE POPULATION.

in their earliest form,) of the nature of mere instincts, such as prompt animals to gregariousness, but they have, in addition to these, some purely human tendencies, which strengthen and extend the family relations. They ought, therefore, to carry the family affections along with them into the social relations. If they do not do so, the fault must result from the wrong direction given to them by human agency. The tree being good by nature, if part of its fruit be corrupt, it must be from corrupt conditions. Some of these are obvious and worth considering, because they are remediable. Our country has the immense advantage of having its social institutions as yet in the gristle.

The Secretary, in his Report, under the head of Sanitary Legislation, calls attention to the important Acts of the Legislature concerning tenements, lodging houses, &c.

Besides endorsing his opinions and recommendations, the Board takes this opportunity to make some general remarks upon the social evils growing out of DENSE POPULATION; especially upon its tendency to crowd certain classes closely together in unwholesome dwellings.

Hitherto, as a general rule, the more society increases in compactness, the more it tends to develop classes of men characterized by tendencies to vice, crime and pauperism.

There must be something wrong here. If the culture were wise and general, then by natural laws the good plants should choke out the poor ones. Virtue, stronger in its essence, should, when aggregated, kill out aggregated vice. But, on the contrary, aggregations of population seem to multiply and strengthen the tares. Their increase and their corrupt nature are shown plainly in cities, and their culmination in those parts of cities which are most densely packed.

Doubtless other circumstances besides mere compactness contribute to increase the evil. Besides, cause and effect act and react, until we are perplexed to distinguish the one from the other. But certainly mere compactness is in itself a great and grievous evil.

Place-space-room, is essential to physical welfare; and without enough of it there cannot be, for the masses at least, any moral well-being.

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

Organic life, even, requires its due proportion of space. Plants crowded together make a jungle in which each strives to live by choking the others, and none attain healthy growth; while the mass exhales noxious miasmata.

Animals crowded together surely become diseased and degenerate. But especially men, with their complex organization, with their superadded dispositions and faculties, and their higher destiny, require freedom in space. Without it they cannot be developed freely and normally. Cramped in space, their growth is abnormal and vicious, and they necessarily vitiate each other. Without room no free and natural growth, no individuality, no character. Without room no cleanliness, no godliness, no rapid growth in personal, domestic, or social culture.

Granted that social aggregation is the legitimate result of natural dispositions and desires which cannot be fully gratified without close neighborhood of a multitude, still, these dispositions and desires, being of the nature of instincts, need to be directed by reason. If those who have power and influence in the direction of great centres of population exercise them vigilantly and wisely, they may greatly modify the results.

Hitherto the chief efforts have been to bring about rapid aggregation of population; to encourage the growth of cities even at the cost of the best interest of the country. As the process of aggregation goes on, and the packing becomes closer and closer, the habitations of the poor become more and more contracted, until they have hardly a place upon the ground, but live in cellars beneath, or attics above.

The general standard of bodily health and strength is lowered in all classes, but chiefly in the highest and in the lowest. Certain classes have a forced and rapid growth of mental faculties, and acquire high polish and moral and religious culture. But certain others are restricted in their mental development to the lowest faculties, which are sharpened into cunning equal to that of the rats which infest the sewers about them; while their moral and religious sentiments are so starved, stunted or distorted, that nothing but their divine nature keeps them from dying out utterly.

EFFECT OF DENSE POPULATION.

Verily great cities should do much to vindicate their claim of being essential to promote the highest culture of a few, for they certainly do much to degrade the physical and moral well-being of the many. They justify the curse called down by the prophet, who cried, "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there is no place."

Some of our centres of population are growing apace. They are passing through social phases and influences similar to those of great foreign countries, and it is well to consider in what condition those influences have culminated there.

Some of the Effects of Dense Population as shown in Paris.

The capital of France furnishes a good illustration of some of the baleful effects of overcrowding, both upon its own citizens and upon those of the neighboring country, because its population is nearly homogeneous and little affected by foreign elements. It is stated upon apparently good authority that more native Parisians die every year than are born in their families in the same time. Nevertheless the population constantly increases, by immigration, mainly from the rural districts, and which is almost entirely of French blood.

Into the human heart flow the effete particles in shape of vitiated blood, which, after being purified and re-vitalized, is thrown out again to freshen and vitalize the whole body. But, into the heart of France, flows the fresh blood of the body of the people, which there becomes impoverished and effete, except a poor residuum which is thrown back again into the country to be purified and vitalized, if it has not become corrupted beyond redemption. The birth-rate indeed exceeds the death-rate in the whole population, but this is on account of the number of freshly arrived families; for so rapid is the process of vitiation of blood among the indigenous families, so diminished the fecundity, so stunted the progeny, that probably, after a few generations, the last Parisian would die a childless dwarf, if immigration from abroad were entirely stopped.

Action and reaction between country and city are not equal. Some of the fresh blood of the country poured into the city is as

d

FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT, 1868.

utterly lost as if it had been spilled upon the ground; while most of that returned to the country is corrupt and sterile.

Into the city the young, the strong, the hopeful come with springing bound; out of it the old, the infirm, the diseased, totter with feeble gait. Still there is a little reaction; and the country nourishes the city at the cost of some of its own purity of blood. It sends the richest; it receives back the poorest.

This is well illustrated in the operation and result of Foundling Hospitals and other establishments for children; which should be carefully considered by those who urge our legislature to graft such institutions upon our system of public charities.

The Maternité of Paris has nearly twenty thousand foundlings and abandoned children, placed out at nurse, or under training in the country. Other large cities also place out great numbers. Then wealthy people send out their weaklings," the dwarfing city's pale abortions,"-hoping to prolong their frail lives, so that several hundred thousand children and youth born in the cities are living in the country. Besides, a large number of broken and diseased people go for health to the numerous Maisons de Santé; others, to spend their last days a little nearer the bosom of nature, from which they have been so long estranged.

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Many of the children from the Foundling, and other public establishments, and some from private families, are of the worst blood blood vitiated by the evil habits of those through whose veins it came, or poisoned by their diseases. Although a large portion of these unfortunates die young, still the exodus from the city tends to enfeeble and corrupt the blood of the country. It tends to enfeeble it, because thousands of poor women, tempted by the price paid for nursing a foundling, put away, or feed by hand their own child, or deprive it of part of its natural food. Thus the country child is weakened to support the frail life of the city child.

But sometimes worse happens, and simple peasant women find themselves suddenly affected by the loathsome disease taken from the nursling's lips; and perhaps infect their husbands, before they suspect its character.

FORMATION OF CLASSES.

Then some children arrive at maturity, and being for the most part of feeble or corrupt stock, impart their characteristics to their offspring.

The fresh blood of the country keeps up the numbers in the city; but it cannot keep the standard of health up to a high point. Statistics help but little to measure this. They may show the average length of life; and this, perhaps, may not vary much. from that in the country; because (the period of childhood safely passed,) the organic life of the individual tends to persist through the time for which it was destined, as a clock tends to run through the time for which it was wound up. Duration of life is one thing; condition of life-vital force, quite another.

The close packing; the lack of muscular exercise out of doors; the vitiated air; the stale provisions, the adulterated food; the general use of condiments and of alcoholic stimulants; all these things go to lower the hygienic condition, or the standard of vital force, in crowded cities.

Now the depression of the standard of vital force, and of constitutional vigor in a community is unavoidably followed by a depression in the moral standard of a considerable proportion of that community.

By the law of affinities, society separates horizontally into lay

Labor is subdivided; and the subdivision goes on more and more minutely until the upper classes monopolize all the brainwork, and impose all the manual work upon the lower classes, who become literally and solely the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Then come the natural affinities, growing out of different degrees of culture; and those who have most, put as far from them, and as far beneath them, as they can, those who have least. Gradually there is formed a coarse substratum, contemptuously called mudsills, upon whom presses, with merciless force, the whole weight of the superincumbent layers.

Work, which, justly divided among men, is honorable, easy and invigorating, and which brings blessings in its train, becomes by unjust partition, dishonorable, hard and exhausting; and brings curses and rottenness upon the social fabric. Some of the lower classes have instinctive perception of this wrong, or they catch the aversion to work from their superiors; and by a