In the decade between 1851 and 1860 there died of diseases attributable to defective drainage and impure water over four thousand persons in every million throughout England: these numbers have declined until in 1888 there died less than two thousand in every million.

The most striking diminution of the deaths from such causes was found in 1891, in the case of typhoid fever, that diminution being fifty per cent.

As to the scourge which, next to plagues like the Black Death, was formerly the most dreaded--smallpox--there died of it in London during the year 1890 just one person.

Drainage in Bristol reduced the death rate by consumption from 4.4 to 2.3; at Cardiff, from 3.47 to 2.31; and in all England and Wales, from 2.68 in 1851 to 1.55 in 1888.
What can be accomplished by better sanitation is also seen to-day by a comparison between the death rate among the children outside and inside the charity schools.

The death rate among those outside in 1881 was twelve in a thousand; while inside, where the children were under sanitary regulations maintained by competent authorities, it has been brought down first to eight, then to four, and finally to less than three in a thousand.
In view of statistics like these, it becomes clear that Edwin Chadwick and his compeers among the sanitary authorities have in half a century done far more to reduce the rate of disease and death than has been done in fifteen hundred years by all the fetiches which theological reasoning could devise or ecclesiastical power enforce.
Not less striking has been the history of hygiene in France: thanks to the decline of theological control over the universities, to the abolition of monasteries, and to such labours in hygienic research and improvement as those of Tardieu, Levy, and Bouchardat, a wondrous change has been wrought in public health.