These evils have become more apparent during
the last twenty years than before, and it has been the fashion to attribute
their increase, with their frightful consequences, mainly to the enormous
Irish immigration, which for a time crowded our streets with poor, foreign
in origin, and degraded, not only by hereditary poverty, but by centuries
of civil and religious oppression. This view is no doubt in part correct;
but the larger share of the evils in our cities is due to causes
unconnected in any necessary relation with the immigration,--causes
contemporaneous with it in their development, and brought into fuller
action by it, rather than consequent upon it.
More than half the sickness and more than half the deaths in New York (and
probably the same holds true of our other cities) are due to causes which
may be prevented,--in other words, which are the result of individual or
municipal neglect, of carelessness or indifference in regard to the known
and established laws of life. More than half the children who are born in
New York (and the proportion is over forty per cent. in Boston) die before
they are five years old. Much is implied in these statements,--among other
things, much criminal recklessness and wanton waste of the sources of
wealth and strength in a state.
In Paris, in London, and in other European cities, the average mortality
has been gradually diminishing during the last fifty years. In New York, on
the contrary, it has increased with frightful rapidity; and in Boston,
though the increase has not been so alarming, it has been steady and
rapid.
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