416

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

III.

would, if withdrawn, be missed as painfully by the labourer"as by the peer. The market place which the rustic can nowreach with his cart in an hour was, a hundred and sixty yearsago, a day’s journey from him. The street which now affordsto the artisan, during the whole night, a secure, a convenient,and a brilliantly lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty yearsago, so dark after sunset that he would not have been able tosee his hand, so ill paved that he would have run constant riskof breaking his neck, and so ill watched that he would havebeen in imminent danger of being knocked down and plunder-ed of his small earnings. Every bricklayer who falls from ascaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by acarriage, may now have his wounds dressed and his limbs setwith a skill such as, a hundred and sixty years ago, all thewealth of a great lord like Ormond, or of a merchant princelike Clayton, could not have purchased. Some frightfuldiseases have been extirpated by science; and some havebeen banished by police. The term of human life has beenlengthened over the whole kingdom, and especially in thetowns. The year 1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in theyear 1685 more than one in twenty-three of the inhabitants ofthe capital died. * At present only one inhabitant of thecapital in forty dies annually. The difference in salubritybetween the London of the nineteenth century and the Lon-don of the seventeenth century is very far greater than thedifference between London in an ordinary season and Londonin the cholera.

Still more important is the benefit which all orders of so-ciety, and especially the lower orders, have derived from themollifying influence of civilisation on the national character.The groundwork of that character has indeed been the samethrough many generations, in the sense in which the ground-work of the character of an individual may be said to be the

■ The deaths were 23,222. — Petty's Political Arithmetic.