that the reason why London children of the wealthier classes are
noticeable even to a proverb for their robustness and bloom, is because
none but those who are already vigorous to excess, and who start with
advantages of health far beyond the average scale, have much chance of
surviving that most searching quarantine, which, in such [Footnote: For
myself, meantime, I am far from assenting to all the romantic abuse
applied to the sewerage and the church-yards of London, and even more
violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the
metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards
cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters.
And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the _Times_
starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to
be even a vast sewer, in short, the _cloaca maxima_ of London,
there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to
our mighty English capital. On the contrary, _all_ great cities
that ever were founded have sought out, as their first and elementary
condition, the adjacency of some great cleansing river. In the long
process of development through which cities pass, commerce and other
functions of civilization come to usurp upon the earlier functions of
such rivers, and sometimes (through increasing efforts of luxurious
refinement) may come entirely to absorb them. But, in the infancy of
every great city, the chief function for which she looks to her river
is that of purification. Be thou my huge _cloaca_, says infant
Babylon to the Euphrates, says infant Nineveh to the Tigris, says
infant Rome to the Tiber. So far is that reproach from having any
special application to London. Smoke is not unwholesome; in many
circumstances it is salubrious, as a counter-agent to worse influences.
Even sewerage is chiefly insalubrious from its moisture, and not, in
any degree yet demonstrated, from its odor.] an atmosphere, they are
summoned to weather at starting. Coming, however, to the special case