Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Civilization and Health: Read Before the American Social Science Association at the Lowell Institute, Boston, March 1, 1870
Time scarcely suffices even to hint at the effects upon mankind of the use of glass in building. This is assuredly entitled to rank among the greatest of the sort of experiments which we are consid ering. The ingenious statement has been made that we have no natural grown men now that, like unseasonable lettuces, they are all raised under glass. The alternative, however, is not between glass and Open air, as this statement would suggest, but between good shelter with light and possible cleanliness, on the one hand, and bad shelter with darkness and inevitable filth on the other hand, as one need not travel many miles in the south Of Ireland to find out. Even so far as the admission of air is concerned, we find practically that ventilation is better where plenty of glass is used in building, however tight the walls may be, than when it is left to chance filtration through the chinks of a mud hut. The in creased cheapness of glass is one of the great material gains of our time. The repeal of the English window-tax marks a distinct ad vance in the hygienic state of the English poor. If in the corn laws the king came between the poor man and his bread, no less in the window-tax did he stand between him and the light Of heaven and so long as that statute endured, the subject might, without affectation or cynicism, urge the request of Diogenes to Alexander.
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