Part 65

Acting in this spirit, Parent Duchâtelet and D’Arcet carried on a minute investigation, in a vast manufactory of tobacco at Paris, containing 1,054 workmen. Not content with the results afforded by a single establishment, they directed questions to the nine other great manufactories of tobacco which France contains, and the answers were prepared by the physicians, surgeons, and officers of each establishment in conjunction. “The observations,” say MM. Duchâtelet and D’Arcet, “which compose this memoir, have been collected from a sum total of 4518 workmen. They appear to us so much the more valuable and conclusive, that they have been made simultaneously in the most opposite parts of France, by men who had not, and could not have, any connexion. There is thus no possibility to suspect the influence of a preconceived opinion; and if those to whom our inquiries were addressed are unanimous in their replies, and if these replies agree with our own observations, we shall be sure that we have arrived at the truth.”

The conclusions which followed from these widely extended researches were—

1. That in the greater part of the factories there was never known an example of an individual who could not accustom himself to the emanations of tobacco, and that in the rare cases where it proved injurious, it was always in a particular part of the process, which merely obliged the workman to be transferred to another department of the factory.

2. That all which has been said on the frequency of nausea, of vomitings, of diarrhœa, of colic, and of haemorrhages, is pure supposition. That it is so no less with respect to the headaches, sneezings, loss of appetite, foulness of breath, acute and chronic affections of the chest, cancers, and other similar diseases. What the same authors say on the discolouration of the skin of the workmen engaged in the preparation of tobacco, on the yellow hue of their complexion, their leanness, and emaciation, proves that they have not observed for themselves, or have only seen the exceptions to the rule, or have not compared this class of people with other workmen of the same town, who were engaged in occupations of a totally different kind.

3. That tobacco, far from producing, in those who prepare it, death and narcotism, does not even influence their nervous system; and that vertigo, syncope, muscular tremor, convulsions, and other like evils, which have been charged against it, have never existed in the manufactories, though the men sleep in the midst of the most subtil preparations, or, at least, are not to be attributed to that cause.

4. Not only is the tobacco without any effect on the health during the first years devoted to its preparation, it has not the least ill consequences in more advanced life. Feebleness and great age, or causes altogether accidental, have been the sole ground for dismissing the workmen.

5. There are some professions which, without destroying health in an evident manner, abridge life; but a great number of those who work on tobacco reach, and even surpass, the ordinary limit of human existence.

6. It is proved by innumerable facts, that the manufactories of tobacco are not in anywise injurious to the men, animals, or plants, which may exist in their vicinity.

It thus turns out, upon examination, that this much maligned substance is perfectly innocuous. “Yet what practitioner,” say MM. Parent Duchâtelet and D’Arcet, “who had not had occasion to visit the workshops and study their influence, would not be forced into belief by the imposing authorities we have quoted above; who of them would hesitate to regard as demonstrated opinions on which Ramazzini, Fourcroy, Cadet Gassicourt, Tourtelle, Percy, Patissier, Merat and others are unanimous, without a single person having uttered a contrary assertion? There are found among these authorities two members of the Royal Academy of Medicine, three members of the Academy of Sciences, two professors of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, one professor of the Faculty of Medicine of Strasbourg, two chemists, and two celebrated physicians—one French, the other Italian; in a word, six physicians and an apothecary, who held, and still hold, the most eminent places in the learned world. It is therefore evident that it is of the highest importance that trades and professions should be investigated differently from what they have hitherto been; and this importance daily increases, because of the progress and extension of arts and manufactures.”

18.—_On the Habitations of the Lower Orders of Paris._ No. 1.

The labouring classes are obliged to live in houses almost always dilapidated, insufficient, or unhealthy. Such is the lot of the poor man in all countries: the force of circumstances, the hard law of necessity, compel it. Yet, if it is impossible to remedy completely this state of things, may we not approximate to it, by building houses for every grade of the lower orders—not only of the honest poor, but of the debased and depraved? It appears to me that these houses would have a double advantage;—they would diminish the causes of public insalubrity, and offer to the honest and economical workman the means to procure a residence equal to his necessities, and capable of producing in him the taste for retirement and domestic peace so favourable to morals. It is especially in this last point of view that the amelioration of the dwellings of the poor and laborious class is to be ranked among the preservatives against vicious habits.

Rent being one of the most important and indispensable domestic expenses, the father of a family, pressed by other wants of the first necessity, naturally seeks the least costly habitation. Now, these habitations exist only in certain quarters, and in certain streets of those quarters: they are old, ruined, and filthy. The proprietors, in order to tenant them, let the lodgings very low, and thus attract the poorer families. If these lodgings were healthy, if they were sufficient for all the members of the family, there would be no room for censure; but they are foul, badly lighted, and neither air-tight nor water-tight. They are small, and as parents and children live and sleep in the same room, the overcrowding is both a cause of unhealthiness, and an offence against good morals. Moreover, the bad state and filth of the passages, privies, and sinks, give rise to infectious exhalations, which vitiate the air of these humble abodes, and affect the health of their inhabitants in a manner so much more mischievous that the greater part of them work all the day in crowded and ill-ventilated shops.

It would be worthy of a wise administration to remedy this dangerous complication. The task is doubtless difficult; but why not grapple with it boldly, instead of allowing to subsist in Paris, without any effort to destroy them, so many centres of infection which reduce to the level of the lowest animals the unfortunate beings who seek in them a retreat for the night.

Although the lodgings are not all repulsive, they are all alike open to criticism. Some offend by overcrowding, others by the mode of sleeping; others, lastly, by the absence of all ventilation, and even by a total want of air. Overcrowding is an evil which prevails in all the lodgings of the lowest class, and which aggravates the mischief resulting from the other inconveniences to which they are subject. The twenty-five or thirty thousand workmen employed in house-building, who flock to Paris every year from certain departments, congregate in chambers, and sleep there during the season. Many of these places are kept by countrymen of their own, who attract them by their known probity, and the kindness they entertain for them. These chambers abound principally in the quarter of the Hôtel-de-Ville for the masons, and in the Faubourg Saint-Martin for the carpenters. These excellent workmen, by an exception more peculiar to them than to any others, look only to economy. They bargain with the lodging-house keeper, so as to obtain for six francs a month, besides the room, the washing of a shirt a-week, and a mess of soup every day, for which they themselves provide the bread. All that is not devoted to their slender wants is laid by for the support of their family, or the increase of their little patrimony. The police unanimously testify to the order and concord which reign in their chambers, as well as to their good conduct abroad. Is it not mournful that these fine fellows should sleep thus piled up in little garrets? Accustomed to work in the open air, the smallness of their rooms is more trying to them than to any others. Thus typhus fever is common among them, and sometimes attacks a whole chamber.

The overcrowding and deficient ventilation are still more injurious to workmen employed in manufactures. They pass every day from an infected lodging into a shop which is usually as unwholesome, and they are thus predisposed to contract readily contagious maladies.

Of all the lower orders, the chiffonniers inhabit the most infected and disgusting lodgings. It is vain to expect to descend into the lowest ranks of society,—inequality always appears somewhere. Even the chiffonniers have their notables. There are some a little more economical, a little more raised than the mass, and who enjoy a certain comfort. Those the most elevated occupy one or two small rooms, which they hire for themselves and their families; others possess a pallet, which serves them to sleep on, in the chamber of which they are one occupant among many. But this possession is more often collective than personal; and although shared, it does not fail to excite the envy of the poor wretches who lie in a species of trough, on rags, or on handsful of straw, with which the room is strewed. The police charged with the surveillance of the lodgings inhabited by the chiffonniers give an incredible picture of them. Each occupant keeps by him his basket, sometimes full of filth—and what filth! These savages do not hesitate to comprise dead animals in their gleanings, and pass the night by the side of this stinking prey. When the police go to these places, they experience a suffocating feeling, bordering on asphyxy. They order the windows to be opened when they can be opened, and the severe representations they address to the lodging-house keepers on this horrible mixture of human beings with decayed animal matter does not move them. They answer, that their lodgers are accustomed to it as well as themselves. A trait of manners peculiar to the chiffonniers, and which might be called their pastime, consists in rat-catching in the courts of the houses which they frequent. They entice the rats by the aid of certain substances attached to the rags they gather in the streets. With this view they put heaps of rags near the holes in the walls, and when they think that the rats are buried in the rags, they let loose into the court dogs trained for the purpose, and, in the twinkling of an eye, they make themselves masters of the rats, of which they eat the flesh and sell the skin.

The lodgings which receive at night the scum of society are thorough pest-houses. Those even which are not frequented by chiffonniers become, by the crowding of the inhabitants and their filthy habits, dangerous centres of infection. There are some chambers which contain as many as nine beds, separated by small passages hardly wide enough to get through, and these beds are often occupied by two persons who do not know each other, and have never seen one another. Difference of sex is no obstacle to these nocturnal and fortuitous cohabitations, although the police neglect nothing to prevent disorders. Among the female apartments there is one which is famous for the picture of decrepitude and abjectness which it presents. The women who occupy it are old drunkards, of whom several are suspected of theft. The spectacle of these animated mummies has something sepulchral.

One must bring to social anatomy a serious spirit of investigation, to form a just idea of the population which lives in the concealed recesses of society. The imagination, however fertile and daring, could never reach, in this matter, to the height of the reality: there is a character, a physiognomy, a strangeness, which it is necessary to have seen in order to assume the responsibility of an historian. Let no one tax with romance the traits of manners nor the description of places contained in this chapter. However softened by the reserve I have imposed on myself, they are not less true at bottom. I have sacrificed the coarseness of the outline and colouring out of respect to decency. It is the only infidelity of which I accuse myself. It is impossible not to feel the necessity to provide an efficacious remedy for a state of things so contrary to the rights of humanity and civilization.[57]

19.—_On the Habitations and Lodgings of the Lower Orders of Paris._ No. 2.

There exist in Paris some thousands of individuals who have no domicile—who sleep to-day in one place, the next day in another—and who have recourse every evening to those houses where, for a payment usually very moderate, they can at least obtain a place to lie in, and a covering for their heads. It is not only strangers living temporarily in Paris who lodge in this manner; a mass of workmen, mostly single men, who have not stirred from the capital for ten, fifteen, and twenty years, prefer this kind of life to the occupation of a separate chamber. It may be affirmed, without fear of contradiction, that this population comprises all that is most drunken and debased in society. It is composed of people without foresight, and without a home, living from day to day, and trusting to the hospitals in the case of sickness or infirmity. It is in the lowest places in these disgusting haunts in which a person is lodged for six, four, and even for two sous, that the greater part of the prostitutes reside, who can scarcely, after purchasing food, lay aside from their daily gains the trifling sum necessary to avert sleeping in the open air. I have visited some of these lodgings, and it was not without a feeling of pain that I have seen human creatures reduced to live in such places, and that in the capital of France. To give a just idea of these abodes, I will extract some passages from the remarkable report which the inspector-general of furnished lodgings addressed to the prefect of police at the time of the cholera. It tells of nothing but houses in ruin, of straw for beds in a state of putrefaction, of darkness, of infectious smells, of filth without example. These are some of the passages:—

“Rue ——, No. —. This house is remarkable for its excessive dirt. It is a genuine centre of infection. It is inhabited solely by thieves, smugglers, beggars, and prostitutes. It is impossible to enter without being suffocated.

“Rue ——, No. —. This house fixes the attention by its construction and filth. There are no beds, except some loathsome pallets; animal remains, intestines, and the refuse of meals, are rotting in the court; all the chambers look on a corridor completely deprived of air and light; the sinks and the privies of every story are loathsome from ordure and fecal matter. It is the hideous abode of vice and misery.

“Rue ——, No. —. The court of this house is four feet square, and is full of dung; the chambers, crowded with occupants, open on it; the privies, dilapidated to the fifth floor, let the fecal matter fall upon the staircase, which is covered with it to the bottom. Many of the rooms have no other aperture than the door which opens upon this staircase. The house is the resort of sharpers, of thieves, of the most filthy prostitutes, and of everything that is most abject both of men and women.

“Rue du Faubourg ——, No. —. A house occupied from top to bottom by chiffonniers, mendicants, street-organists, street-walkers, and Italian boys, who go about with animals. All these sleep upon rags picked from the street, and of which there is a depôt on the ground-floor. More complete abjectness it is impossible to witness.

“Rue ——, No. —. This house is the resort of all that is most abased. It is exclusively inhabited by thieves, prostitutes, discharged criminals, beggars, vagabonds, gamesters, and every species of rogues. The greatest filth reigns everywhere; the windows are made of oiled paper instead of glass; the rooms are infected; at each story the ordure of the privies flows upon the staircase.”[58]

Another French writer, M. Frégier, has given the following description of the external appearance of these abodes:—“The streets, not, at farthest, more than eight feet wide, are dirty, and flanked by lofty houses, four stories high, which are blackened by time. The height of the houses renders the streets gloomy and damp, and the houses themselves are dark, particularly on the ground-floor. Spirit shops, beer shops, and low eating houses abound. The gloom of these shops, joined to the repulsive physiognomy of the streets, infuse a secret horror into the visitor who is led there by the spirit of observation, and who knows that the greater part of the shops are the habitual resort of the lowest prostitutes, and of rogues that live in the neighbourhood. The lodgings and places of dissipation frequented by this part of the population are worthy, from their filth, of the streets and quarters in which they are situated.”[59]

20.-_Extract from the Report of the Commission appointed by the Central Board of Public Health to ascertain the Condition of the Dwellings of the Working Classes in Brussels, and to suggest Means for their Improvement._

Our inquiries have led us more particularly into the most populous and miserable districts into which the working classes are continually crowding, in proportion as new and elegant buildings have encroached upon the districts within the heart of the capital, formerly almost exclusively occupied by those classes. We have visited successively, in the district of _Minimes_, the _rue des Pignons_, and _de la Samaritane_, the _cul-de-sac des Minimes_, the alley _des Prêtres_, _les rues de l’Epris_, _du Bourreau_, _de la Oventail_, &c.; in the district _de la Chapelle_, _les rues des Ménages_, _du Radro_, _de la Rasière_, _des Rats_, _du Renard_, &c.; in the district _de la rue d’Anderlecht_, _la rue des Navets_, and the alley _au Lait_. We entered into a great number of the dwellings. We not only inquired, but also inspected, in order that we might ascertain the truth of the statements which were made to us. In now presenting the results of this inquiry, we do not hesitate to call your attention to the very important facts which have been gathered, at the same time that we ask your indulgence for the imperfect manner in which we have been able to perform the duties committed to our zeal and exertions.

The misery of the localities we have visited struck us immediately, from their appearance of uniform poverty. The streets and alleys, at all times dirty and ill-paved, in times of rain or thaw had the appearance of a pestilential mire; the water had no means of running off, and the smallness of the passages, the absence of courts or gardens, the crowding of families, and the detestable modes of building, rendered all circulation of air or ventilation quite impossible. The most indispensable conveniences were entirely wanting in most of the houses. They had no pumps, nor privies, nor sewers, except one in common. Indeed, we saw seventy houses that were provided with only one pump or one privy for the whole of that number.

If you enter the houses, the spectacle which is there presented to your view is, if anything, still more wretched. If the arrangement and order to be seen in some of the rooms recall the proverbial neatness of the Flemish, on the other hand, the houses occupied by large families, the alleys, the passages, and the stairs, are generally disgustingly filthy; the brush of the whitewasher never passes along them, or if they are ever cleaned, it is only to attract new tenants, who soon restore them to their primitive dirtiness. The steepness of the stairs, which, indeed, are often more like ladders, must be a perpetual cause of accidents, especially to the young children. The space occupied by a family is generally much too confined for each of the members to receive the quantity of fresh air necessary for the preservation of health. Hence their appearance is generally that of suffering and of bad condition. The children are pale and emaciated, and bear all the visible signs of premature suffering. The number of those who are rickety and scrofulous is considerable, and the mortality amongst the children and the aged exceeds all the most unfavourable averages. As we pass along these receptacles of misery, we feel astonished to see so few old people; an early death has carried them beyond their wretchedness: and if inquiries are made of parents, there are few who have not lost one or more children. It would be important to compare the proportion of deaths in the families of the rich and of the indigent. There is little doubt that this comparison would prove that misery, the want of proper air and space, the occupations of these people, and privations of every sort, sensibly diminish the period of life of the working classes.

In these wretched habitations everything is sacrificed generally to the rapacity of the proprietor. Every repair which affects the health or the comfort of the tenant merely, and that is not necessary to prevent the total ruin of the dwelling, is entirely neglected. What is the use of cleaning the walls for people whose habits are filthy? Why make windows for the entrance of air and light, or repair a sewer, or cleanse an alley covered with stagnant water, for people who are accustomed to pestilential smells? It is what a proprietor can never understand. Do not believe, however, that these dreadful abodes are rented at their proper value. On the contrary, the unfortunate people obliged to live in these houses, because all better ones are closed against them, in reality pay a higher rent than for a wholesome room in a good house.

21. _Principles of Sanitary Police in Germany. Extracts from Professor_ MOHL.

It is one important duty of a State to provide abundant supplies of water for its people; and this duty is based on the impossibility, in many cases, for individuals by their own exertions to procure even the barest necessary quantity of water, and also that it requires much skill to distinguish that which is of a good quality from that which is injurious. The State ought, therefore, to provide water of the best quality in sufficient abundance, and to arrange also for its most extensive distribution: this is often attended with great difficulties and with much expense, if the district is naturally ill-supplied with springs of water; or where a town, being large, requires more water than its own surface springs, or those of the immediate neighbourhood, can supply. Without maintaining that the example given us by ancient nations, of munificent expenditure in the laying out of aqueducts, &c., is one which we, therefore, are obliged to follow, yet it may be demanded of the State, that it should provide water, at least so far as the absolute wants of life require, by aqueducts or pipes, or at least by cisterns, laid down at the public expense. For the sake of the poorer classes, it does not seem advisable that this duty should be handed over to a private company.[60]