[8] God lays down certain physical laws.  Upon His carrying out such laws depends our responsibility (that much abused word), for how could we have any responsibility for actions, the results of which we could not foresee—­which would be the case if the carrying out of His laws were not certain.  Yet we seem to be continually expecting that He will work a miracle—­i.e. break His own laws expressly to relieve us of responsibility.

[9]

[Sidenote:  Servants’ rooms.]

I must say a word about servants’ bed-rooms.  From the way they are built, but oftener from the way they are kept, and from no intelligent inspection whatever being exercised over them, they are almost invariably dens of foul air, and the “servants’ health” suffers in an “unaccountable” (?) way, even in the country.  For I am by no means speaking only of London houses, where too often servants are put to live under the ground and over the roof.  But in a country “mansion,” which was really a “mansion,” (not after the fashion of advertisements), I have known three maids who slept in the same room ill of scarlet fever.  “How catching it is,” was of course the remark.  One look at the room, one smell of the room, was quite enough.  It was no longer “unaccountable.”  The room was not a small one; it was up stairs, and it had two large windows—­but nearly every one of the neglects enumerated above was there.

[10]

[Sidenote:  Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another.]

Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs? instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves.

I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog.

Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been “caught,” but must have begun.

Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another.  Now, dogs do not pass into cats.

I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.

Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon disease in this light?