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