Physically, the national type was changing; the ruddy, careless Englishman of the ...

Physically, the national type was changing; the ruddy, careless Englishman of the eighteenth century, turbulent but placable, as ready with his friendship as his fists, seemed to be making way for a pallid, sullen stock, twisted in mind and body.

And if the eye which ranged with such complacency over the palaces of Regent's Park, the thronging masts of wide-wayed Liverpool, the roaring looms of hundred-gated Leeds, descended to a closer view, of Finsbury, say, or Ancoats, it would have observed that the breeding ground of the new race was such that in truth it could breed nothing else. The life within the factory or the mine was doubtless rigorous, and to children often cruel, but the human frame is immensely resilient, and with such care as many good employers took, the working hours of a labourer's life were probably his happiest.

But the imagination can hardly apprehend the horror in which thousands of families a hundred years ago were born, dragged out their ghastly lives, and died: the drinking water brown with fecal particles, the corpses kept unburied for a fortnight in a festering London August; mortified limbs quivering with maggots; courts where not a weed would grow, and sleeping-dens afloat with sewage.' In London the mortality was twice as great in the East End as in the West.

In adjacent streets it varied from 38 to 50. And while the new proletariat was failing below the median queue of improving decency on one side, the middle classes were rising above it on the other, becoming progressively more regular, more sober, more clean in body, more delicate in speech.