I look forward—­I say it openly—­to some period of higher civilisation, when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories and workshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; when officers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilation of every room in which persons are employed for hire; and empowered also to demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether in country or in town.  To that, I believe, we must come:  but I had sooner far see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law; carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily, from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity.  I appeal, therefore, to the good feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whom they employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutely need, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsible to their country and their God.

And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me—­“Why make all this fuss about ventilation?  Our forefathers got on very well without it”—­I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors did nothing of the kind.  Our ancestors got on usually very ill in these matters:  and when they got on well, it was because they had good ventilation in spite of themselves.

First.  They got on very ill.  To quote a few remarkable instances of longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and strong.  The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity of the training.  Savages do not increase in number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for many centuries.  I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics of disease:  but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state and of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far greater then than it is now.  Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague, plague—­all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air—­devastated this land and Europe in those days with a horrible intensity, to which even the choleras of our times are mild.  The back streets, the hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps—­every place in which any large number of persons congregated, were so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which denied alike the water which was drunk and the air which was breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables of insurance companies assure us, the average of human life in England has increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I., owing simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.