in England the reductions that have been found necessary to keep the regiments filled may be due to the fact that the attractions of private employment are now greater than they were. It must be admitted also that the average of life in England is now longer than it was,—a fact which seems inconsistent with reduced vitality. Still, it may be questioned if we can infer more from this than that science, to some extent, compensates the disadvantages that result from the city life carried to excess. What science has done cannot easily be over-estimated. Leprosy, smallpox, the Black Death, the plague, and the sweating sickness, are little more than memories of the past. In 1349 the Black Death carried off at least a third of the population of all England, the deaths in London alone being reckoned at 100,000.[1] The cholera of 1831-32 only carried off 5275 in a ten times larger London, and was scarcely felt except in the slums of great cities.[2] The sufferers from plague in old times used to comfort themselves with the expectation that if they recovered they would be disease-proof for the future;[3] but the records of mortality show that these terrible visitations carried off not only two-thirds of those who were attacked, but left the remainder with debilitated constitutions. As late as Adam Smith's time the mortality among the children of the poor was enormous. "In some places," he says, "one-half the children born die before they are four years of age; in many places before they
- ↑ Pearson's English History in the Fourteenth Century, p. 154. Compare Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages. "It probably killed a third of the population."—Rogers's Economical Interpretation of History, p. 22.
- ↑ Martineau's Thirty Years' Peace, vol. ii. p. 486.
- ↑ "It was the opinion of the most eminent physicians of that time that the plague was itself a sufficient purge, and that those who escaped the infection needed no physic."—Defoe's History of the Plague, p. 198. Compare Thucydides, ii. cap. 51 and 58.
