Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays. Charles Kingsley

or old brewers’ vats, as a stratum of poison, killing occasionally the men who descend into it.  Hence, as foolish a practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards the small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor is breathing carbonic acid.

      And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the poor.  The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their bedsteads and keep their beds.  Never, if you have influence, let that happen.  Keep the bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the sleeper from the carbonic acid on the floor.

      How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the room?  After all that has been written and tried on ventilation, I know no simpler method than putting into the chimney one of Arnott’s ventilators, which may be bought and fixed for a few shillings; always remembering that it must be. fixed into the chimney as near the ceiling as possible.  I can speak of these ventilators from twenty-five years’ experience.  Living in a house with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonic acid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that these ventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the presence of one of these ventilators in a room more valuable than three or four feet additional height of ceiling.  I have found, too, that their working proves how necessary they are, from this simple fact: You would suppose that, as the ventilator opens freely into the chimney, the smoke would be blown down through it in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this is just what does not happen.  If the ventilator be at all properly poised, so as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other moments keep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there is an up-draught of heated air continually escaping from the ceiling up the chimney.  Another very simple method of ventilation is employed in those excellent cottages which Her Majesty has built for her labourers round Windsor.  Over each door a sheet of perforated zinc, some eighteen inches square, is fixed; allowing the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the ceiling of the passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape into the roof.  Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by piercing the windows, or otherwise.  And here let me give one hint to all builders of houses: If possible, let bedroom windows open at the top as well as at the bottom.

      Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not only on parents and educators, but on those who employ workpeople, and above all on those who employ young women in shops or in work-rooms.  What their condition may be in this city I know not; but most painful it has been to me in other places, when passing through warehouses or workrooms, to see the pale, sodden, and, as the French would say, “etiolated” countenances of the girls who were passing the greater part of the day in them; and painful, also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made them unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the seeds of death, not only in the present but future generations.

      Why should this be?  Everyone will agree that good ventilation is necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without fresh air.  Do they not see that by the same reasoning good ventilation is necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain well without fresh air?  Let me entreat those who employ women in workrooms, if they have no time to read through such books as Dr. Andrew Combe’s “Physiology applied to Health and Education,” and Madame de Wahl’s “Practical Hints on the Moral, Mental, and Physical Training of Girls,” to procure certain tracts published by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies’ Sanitary Association; especially one which bears on this subject: “The Black-hole in our own Bedrooms;” Dr. Lankester’s “School Manual of Health;” or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.

      I look forward—I say it openly—to some period of higher civilisation, when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories and workshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; when officers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilation of every room in which persons are employed for hire: and empowered also to demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether in country or in town.  To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner far see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law; carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily, from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity.  I appeal, therefore, to the good feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whom they employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutely need, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsible to their country and their God.

      And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me: “Why make all this fuss about ventilation?  Our forefathers got on very well without it”—I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors did nothing of the kind.  Our ancestors got on usually very ill in these matters: and when they got on well, it was because they had good ventilation in spite of themselves.

      First.  They got on very ill.  To quote a few remarkable instances of longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and strong.  The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity of the training.  Savages do not increase in number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for many centuries.  I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics of disease: but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state and of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far greater then than it is now.  Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague, plague—all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air—devastated this land and Europe in those days with a horrible intensity, to which even the choleras of our times are mild.  The back streets, the hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps—every place in which any large number of persons congregated, were so many nests of pestilence, engendered by uncleanliness, which defiled alike the water which was drunk and the air which was breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables of insurance companies assure us, the average of human life in England has increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I., owing simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.

      But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did so because they got ventilation in spite of themselves.  Luckily for them, their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows would not shut.  They had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in one of which, as I can testify from long experience, is as thoroughly ventilating as living in a lantern with the horn broken out.  It was because their houses were full of draughts, and still more, in the early Middle Age, because they had no glass, and stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they sought for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes, such as that in which the old city of Winchester stands.  Shelter, I believe, as much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to occupy the rich alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old England choose the river-banks for the sites of their abbeys.  They made a mistake therein, which, like most mistakes, did not go unpunished.  These low situations, especially while the forests were yet thick on the hills around, were the perennial haunts of fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons, carried in the carbonic acid given off by rotten vegetation.  So there, again, they fell in with man’s old enemy—bad air.  Still, as long as the doors and windows did not shut, some free circulation of air remained.  But now, our doors and windows shut only too tight.  We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.  We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up hermetically from the outer air, and to breath our own breaths over and over again; and we pay the penalty of it in a thousand ways unknown to our ancestors, through whose rooms all the winds of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to shelter themselves from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen round the fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the four-post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher civilisation.  We therefore absolutely require to make for ourselves the very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to escape.

      But,