western portions of the city are clean, for such a large town. But the
low-lying districts along the river and its tributary becks are narrow,
dirty, and enough in themselves to shorten the lives of the inhabitants,
especially of little children. Added to this, the disgusting state of
the working-men's districts about Kirkgate, Marsh Lane, Cross Street and
Richmond Road, which is chiefly attributable to their unpaved, drainless
streets, irregular architecture, numerous courts and alleys, and total
lack of the most ordinary means of cleanliness, all this taken together
is explanation enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes
of filthy misery. In consequence of the overflows of the Aire" (which,
it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture,
flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at
the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse),
"the houses and cellars are often so full of water that they have to be
pumped out. And at such times the water rises, even where there are
sewers, out of them into cellars, {40a} engenders miasmatic vapours
strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen, and leaves a disgusting
residuum highly injurious to health. During the spring-floods of 1839
the action of such a choking of the sewers was so injurious, that,
according to the report of the Registrar of Births and Deaths for this
part of the town, there were three deaths to two births, whereas in the
same three months, in every other part of the town, there were three
births to two deaths. Other thickly populated districts are without any
sewers whatsoever, or so badly provided as to derive no benefit from
them. In some rows of houses the cellars are seldom dry; in certain
districts there are several streets covered with soft mud a foot deep.
The inhabitants have made vain attempts from time to time to repair these
streets with shovelfuls of cinders, but in spite of all such attempts,
dung-heaps, and pools of dirty water emptied from the houses, fill all
the holes until wind and sun dry them up. {40b} An ordinary cottage in