Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/363

Rh stretched across the room on which, on the payment of a penny, men were entitled to rest their arms and sleep standing." I do not know that in many places things are quite as bad as that, but in all our large towns and in our small towns, too, housing conditions and overcrowding exist that are an outrage on decency and a disgrace to our civilization.

And heavy are the penalties we pay for these housing conditions and this overcrowding in combination with other insanitary influences that appertain to towns! The urban death-rate for England and Wales is 17 per 1,000 living; the rural death-rate is 12.9; the urban infantile death-rate is 165 per 1,000 births, the rural rate is 126. In every city and town with the increasing density of population on square space, there is an increasing general and special mortality at all ages, but particularly under one year, in insanitary areas. Typhoid fever causes a much greater loss of life in the town than in the country. The urban death-rate from pneumonia exceeds the rural by 87 per cent. The mortality from consumption is at the rate of 1,298 per million living in urban districts and of 1,108 in rural districts. Urban areas suffer more severely from cancer than do rural areas. And almost all these diseases, as well as others which I have not mentioned, because they figure less largely as causes of death, are most prevalent in the most densely built parts of the town, and in the most densely populated areas of these parts, and prevail in these areas in proportion to the number of inmates in the houses, of persons per room, and of insanitary dwellings such as back to back houses, stable dwellings, tenement houses, cellar dwellings and flat houses.

That the townsman is shorter lived than the countryman is incontrovertible. Dr. Tatham calculated that in the rural districts of England the average expectation of life at birth is 51.48 years for males and 54.04 for females, whereas in Manchester it is only 28.78 for males and 32.67 for females, which means that each male has to sacrifice 10.48 years or 39 per cent, of his life, and each female 9.82 years or 34 per cent, of her life for the privilege of being born in an urban area. To show the social waste involved in such heavy mortality, it is enough to point out that 100,000 males born in Manchester would be reduced to 62,326, and 100,000 females to 66,325 in five years; while in the healthy districts it would take fifty and forty-eight years respectively to bring about the same reduction. Clearly the concentration of the population produces a prodigious drain on the vitality of the people, another indication of which is supplied by Dr. ShrubshalPs observation that town life tends to extinguish the fair-haired Scandinavian and Teutonic elements in our people which are giving way before the brunette elements of southern derivation.

And the pernicious consequences of such concentration are