Address To the Working Classes

Abstract

THE Sanitary Institute has made it one of its duties to provide an address to the working-classes of the town in which it holds its Annual Congress. And it has been allotted to me, as Chairman of the Council of the Sanitary Institute, to address you on this occasion. If it were necessary to assmne a title for my address I would select the motto of a kindred society, viz., the National Health Society, which is, &dquo; Prevention is better than Cure.&dquo; For we sanitarians hold that the health of a nation depends very much upon the will of the nation. More than one-half the diseases from which we suffer, and more than one-half the deaths, arise from causes which we sanitarians say are within ougrown control. The present is an occasion of more than usual importance, for not only does the nea.r approach to our shores of a dire epidemic, the cholera, compel us to direct our attention to the progress of sanitation in this country, but Parliament and the public have at last awakened to the fact that a large portion of the working classes of this country have been, and still are, permitted to live in wretched unhealthy dwellings, and an Act of Parliament has been passed for amending the law relating to the housing of the working classes. ' These two subjects are closely related to each other. There are many people who assert that we have made so much progress since the last visitation of cholera to this country that we may now hope almost entirely to escape from its ravages. I earnestly wish I could believe that it might be so; but when I