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Updated: July 27, 2025
The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and filthy beyond description, the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen. The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any plaster, are rotten, and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death-rate in five years was 41.38."
Scurvy still caused trouble; but though twelve died, the mortality was not so high as at St Croix. Everything considered, Port Royal enjoyed good fortune according to the colonial standards of the period, when a winter death-rate of twenty-six per cent was below the average.
Then, as he waited for the camp-partner who was to follow him into Toluca, he drifted with amiable and ponderous restlessness about the town, talking with the telegraph operator and the barber, swapping yarns at the livery-stable where his pack-mule was lodged, handing out cigars in the wooden-fronted hotel, casually interviewing the town officials as to the health of the locality and the death-rate of Toluca, acquainting himself with the local undertaker and the lonely young doctor, and even dropping in on the town officials and making inquiries about main-street building lots and the need of a new hotel.
I afterwards ascertained from the doctor in charge of this building that, thanks to fever, drink, and sunstroke, it was seldom empty, and that the death-rate amongst the European soldiers was exceedingly high. On our return to the hotel we passed a criminal being taken to the railway station en route for Batavia, where he was to be executed on the morrow.
It will be seen that Australia and New Zealand, with low birth-rates and the lowest death-rates in the world increase more rapidly than Russia with an enormous birth-rate and proportionately high death-rate. No one can doubt that our colonies achieve their increase with far less friction and misery than the prolific but short-lived Slavs.
A rickisha ride through the teeming streets of the Chinese or Malay quarters, especially at night, is most interesting. If taken during the day a Chinese funeral procession with its banners, bands and tom-toms may be met; in fact the death-rate among the squalid Chinese residents is so high that funerals are of very frequent occurrence.
The Los Amigos folk say that they are the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for everything in Los Amigos except the gaol and the death-rate. Those are said to be the smallest. Now, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed to be a sinful waste of hemp that the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner.
And we, because at last they were taking their full share, were threatened with a water famine! Yes, if they had those tenement baths which the last Housing Commission recommended they could run us dry as their leader proposed, hold the whole city up to ransom and dictate terms. As it was even those taps proved dangerous, so we gave them buttons instead; and of course the death-rate has gone up."
With civilised nations this primary check acts chiefly by restraining marriages. The greater death-rate of infants in the poorest classes is also very important; as well as the greater mortality, from various diseases, of the inhabitants of crowded and miserable houses, at all ages.
This decline of the tuberculosis death-rate is, of course, only a part of the general improvement of physique which is taking place under civilization. If we could only get out from under the influence of the "good old times" obsession and open our eyes to see what is going on about us! There is nothing mysterious about it.
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