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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.
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