Though by no means an enthusiastic admirer of the Duke of Wellington, _Punch_ confesses that he would like to see him appointed Sanitary Dictator. The Thames, with its "acres of cesspool," is likened to "a fetid Dead Sea." Yet _Punch_ refused to lay the blame at the door of Lord John Russell or the Government, who were held guilty by the _Morning Herald_ for the twelve thousand deaths from cholera in London. The real criminals were to be found elsewhere. The ravages of typhus and cholera in 1849 have been surpassed in recent years by those of influenza, but the toll was heavy, and heaviest among the poor:--
For three sad months Britannia mourned her children night and day, For three sad months she strove in vain the pestilence to stay; Medicine, helpless, groped and guessed, and tried all arts to save, But the dead carried with them their secret to the grave.
Death sat at the gaunt weaver's side, the while he plied the loom; Death turned the wasting grinder's wheel, as he earn'd his bread and doom; Death, by the wan shirtmaker, plied the fingers to the bone; Death rocked the infant's cradle, and with opium hushed its moan.
The Metropolitan Internments Bill, introduced in 1850, was a much-needed reform, and furnished _Punch_ with an occasion for free-spoken denunciation of "King Cholera's friends," Boards of Guardians, and other obstructives who "laugh to scorn doctors and drains, and uphold the great cause of dirt." His method of dealing with the offenders is generally direct: sometimes it takes the form of extravagant irony, as in the "account of my travels in search of self-government":--
What is it to _me_ that fever is never absent from these places--that infants do not rear, and men die before their time--that sickness engenders pauperism--that filth breeds depression, and depression drives to drink? What do you mean by telling me that cholera slew in Rotherhithe its 205 victims in every 10,000, in St. Olave's its 181, in St. Saviour's its 153, in Lambeth its 120, while in the Strand it carried off only 35, in Kensington 33, in Marylebone 17, and in Hampstead 8, out of the same number? Still, British landlords did what they liked with their own, and self-government is unimpaired. The satellites and slaves of an encroaching centralization are kept at arm's length, and if they have succeeded in putting down sewers, at least we have triumphed in not laying our house-drains into 'em.