Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/12

 of America has been in promoting that of the sovereign people of the "Model Republic." I make no mere random statement in asserting this truth, as you must admit when you have digested the unpalatable facts contained in the following paragraph, which I copy from the New York Courier:—

So great an increase in the rate of mortality in the three largest, wealthiest, and most influential cities of the Union, is a terrible fact, and one that involves some very important conclusions. Observe, too, that this frightful deterioration of the public health, this wholesale destruction of human life, has been going forward with steady pace from year-to year among a people for whose education the most lavish provision has been made. "In the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, more money, in proportion to the population, is raised by taxation, for the support of common schools, than in any other cities in the world." Nor is there any lack of means to provide everything that is needful for the preservation and improvement of the public health. The annual