And as for little children,
of course it is not their fault. But, my friends, it must be
someone's fault. No one will say that the world is so ill made that
these horrible diseases must come in spite of all man's care. If it
was so, plagues, pestilences, and infectious fevers would be just as
common now in England, and just as deadly as they were in old times;
whereas there is not one infectious fever now in England for ten that
there used to be five hundred years ago. In ancient times fevers,
agues, plague, smallpox, and other diseases, whose very names we
cannot now understand, so completely are they passed away, swept
England from one end to the other every few years, killing five
people where they now kill one. Those diseases, as I said, have many
of them now died out entirely; and those which remain are becoming
less and less dangerous every year. And why? Simply because people
are becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living;
because they are tilling and draining the land every year more and
more, instead of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated
land does. It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser: we
ourselves are becoming more reasonable in our way of living. For
instance, in large districts both of Scotland and of the English
fens, where fever and ague filled the country and swept off hundreds
every spring and fall thirty years ago, fever and ague are now almost
unknown, simply because the marshes have all been drained in the
meantime.
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