Take, for instance, an unhealthy street, or block of streets, in a large town.  There you find typhus fever constantly present.  Cleanse and sewer the street; supply it with pure air and pure water, and fever is forthwith banished.  Is not this a much more satisfactory result than the application of drugs?  Fifty thousand persons, says Mr. Lee, annually fall victims to typhus fever in Great Britain, originated by causes which are preventible.  The result is the same as if these fifty thousand persons were annually taken out of their wretched dwellings, and put to death!  We are shocked by the news of a murder—­by the loss of a single life by physical causes!  And yet we hear, almost without a shudder, the reiterated statement of the loss of tens of thousands of lives yearly from physical causes in daily operation.  The annual slaughter from preventible causes of typhus fever is double the amount of what was suffered by the allied armies at the battle of Waterloo!  By neglect of the ascertained conditions of healthful living, the great mass of the people lose nearly half the natural period of their lives.  “Typhus,” says a medical officer, “is a curse which man inflicts upon himself by the neglect of sanitary arrangements.”

Mr. Chadwick affirmed that in the cellars of Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds, he had seen amongst the operatives more vice, misery, and degradation than those which, when detailed by Howard, had excited the sympathy of the world.  The Irish poor sink into the unhealthy closes, lanes, and back streets of large towns; and so frequent are the attacks of typhus among them, that in some parts of the country the disease is known as “the Irish fever.”  It is not merely the loss of life that is so frightful; there is also the moral death that is still more appalling in these unhealthy localities.  Vice and crime consort with foul living.  In these places, demoralization is the normal state.  There is an absence of cleanliness, of decency, of decorum; the language used is polluting, and scenes of profligacy are of almost hourly occurrence,—­all tending to foster idleness, drunkenness, and vicious abandonment.  Imagine such a moral atmosphere for women and children!

The connection is close and intimate between physical and moral health, between domestic well-being and public happiness.  The destructive influence of an unwholesome dwelling propagates a moral typhus worse than the plague itself.  Where the body is enfeebled by the depressing influences of vitiated air and bodily defilement, the mind, almost of necessity, takes the same low, unhealthy tone.  Self-respect is lost; a stupid, inert, languid feeling overpowers the system; the character becomes depraved; and too often—­eager to snatch even a momentary enjoyment, to feel the blood bounding in the veins,—­the miserable victim flies to the demon of strong drink for relief; hence misery, infamy, shame, crime, and wretchedness.