and in the latter clause, the males must be included
also. Above all, in public institutions, and
throughout the whole of every town and city, the
system of ventilation, and drainage, and removal
of impurities requires to be thoroughly revised.
There is no local Legislature in America which may
not study Mr. Chadwick’s excellent Report upon
the Sanitary Condition of our Labouring Classes,
with immense advantage.
* * * * * *
I have now arrived at the close of this book.
I have little reason to believe, from certain warnings
I have had since I returned to England, that it will
be tenderly or favourably received by the American
people; and as I have written the Truth in relation
to the mass of those who form their judgments and
express their opinions, it will be seen that I have
no desire to court, by any adventitious means, the
popular applause.
It is enough for me, to know, that what I have set
down in these pages, cannot cost me a single friend
on the other side of the Atlantic, who is, in anything,
deserving of the name. For the rest, I put
my trust, implicitly, in the spirit in which they have
been conceived and penned; and I can bide my time.
I have made no reference to my reception, nor have
I suffered it to influence me in what I have written;
for, in either case, I should have offered but a
sorry acknowledgment, compared with that I bear within
my breast, towards those partial readers of my former
books, across the Water, who met me with an open
hand, and not with one that closed upon an iron muzzle.
POSTSCRIPT
At a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the
18th of April, 1868, in the City of New York, by
two hundred representatives of the Press of the United
States of America, I made the following observations
among others:
’So much of my voice has lately been heard in
the land, that I might have been contented with troubling
you no further from my present standing-point, were
it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself,
not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever
and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense
of my second reception in America, and to bear my
honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity.
Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the
amazing changes I have seen around me on every side,
— changes moral, changes physical, changes in
the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in
the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth
of older cities almost out of recognition, changes
in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the
Press, without whose advancement no advancement can
take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me,
so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty
years there have been no changes in me, and that
I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to
