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Updated: June 7, 2025
The charming Miss C is swept off by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about "God's heavy judgment and visitation" had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken slopworker, they would have seen why God had visited them, seen that His judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system which "speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth" a system, to use the words of the "Morning Chronicle's" correspondent, "unheard of and unparalleled in the history of any country a scheme so deeply laid for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour to the market, that it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded, by it into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy a system which is steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artizans, living in comparative comfort and civilization, into the dishonourable or sweating trade in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes."
When Arthur Berkeley turned over the first proof-sheets of 'London's Shame, with its simple yet thrilling recital of true tales taken down from the very lips of outcast children or stranded women, with its awful woodcuts and still more awful descriptions word-pictures reeking with the vice and filth and degradation of the most pestilent, overcrowded, undrained tenements he felt instinctively that Ernest Le Breton's book would not need the artificial aid of Lady Hilda's influential friends in order to make it successful and even famous.
It is a true copy of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up its noxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already too much enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of the material miasm."
In one of the high valleys in the hills a great well bubbled up from a hollow by the road, overflowed the stone basin that the ancients had built for it and wasted itself in the undrained soil about. Here, then, was one of the few marshes in Judea. The road by a series of arches crossed it and continued up the shoulder of the hills toward the east.
And he stood for a moment as if in a dream, breathing in the tainted air of narrow, undrained streets; listening to the cry of the watchman slowly dying as the man walked away from him on sandaled, noiseless feet; gazing up at the barred windows, heavily shadowed. There was an old world stillness in the air, and suddenly the bells of fifty churches tolled the hour.
The old Town stands high enough, but is enlaced on the western and southern side by a set of lakes and quagmires, some of which are still extensive and undrained.
Thus the laws of health are disregarded; and when fever comes, it finds a wide field to work upon: in undrained and filthy streets and back-yards, noisome, pestilential districts, foul, uncleansed dwellings, large populations ill-supplied with clean water and with pure air.
Redlaw looked about him; from the houses to the waste piece of ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually towards them, until the last but one was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a plundered little heap of bricks; from that, to the child, close to him, cowering and trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot, while he coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all these things with that frightful likeness of expression so apparent in his face, that Redlaw started from him.
Even the Theresien Strasse has not long rejoiced in a "canal;" and the sewer was laid in that finest part of the Gabelsberger Strasse which runs past the Pinakothek and the Polytechnic School as late as the summer of 1873, while the upper end of the same street, which is notoriously unhealthy, is still unpaved and undrained.
"Well . . . yes, yes . . . why shouldn't I?" he said, and then, "Yes, I will, I will" with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a daring enterprise. Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea, undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists.
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