It would have required manful fighting against the
prejudices, the ignorance, the self-conceit, the laziness, the
covetousness of the wicked world. So they could not afford to repent
and amend of all THAT. And when those great and good men, the
Sanitary Commissioners, proved to all England fifteen years ago, that
cholera always appeared where fever had appeared, and that both fever
and cholera always cling exclusively to those places where there was
bad food, bad air, crowded bedrooms, bad drainage and filth--that
such were the laws of God and Nature, and always had been; they took
no notice of it, because it was the poor rather than the rich who
suffered from those causes. So the filth of our great cities was
left to ferment in poisonous cesspools, foul ditches and marshes and
muds, such as those now killing people by hundreds in the
neighbourhood of Plymouth; for one house or sewer that was improved,
a hundred more were left just as they were in the first cholera; as
soon as the panic of superstitious fear was past, carelessness and
indolence returned. Men went back, the covetous man to his
covetousness, and the idler to his idleness. And behold! sixteen
years are past, and the cholera is as bad as ever among us.
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