DISEASES OF DARKNESS.

RICKETS (probably including dental caries), due primarily to lack of the fresh green food and its derivatives, with which our children are inadequately supplied, because coal-smoke cuts out, say, 40 per cent., in and near our larger cities, of the sunlight by which plants grow; and because our crops are deprived of the ammonium sulphate, which is far worse than wasted when soft coal is barbarously burnt, instead of being distilled by the chemist.

ANAEMIA, directly due in our cities to lack of the sunlight, without which neither chlorophyll, the green stuff of plant leaves, nor haemoglobin, the red stuff of animal blood, can be made. EYE DISEASES, increased by the use of artificial light, required by the obscuring of the light of day.

RESPIRATORY DISEASES, including pulmonary tuberculosis, pneumonia, broncho-pneumonia, influenza, bronchitis, measles, whooping-cough, “cold in the head,” and the rest, due to lowered resistance, and to the loss of the incomparable and irreplaceable antiseptic action of sunlight – which can experimentally kill in a few minutes tubercle bacilli, for instance, that will still be virulent after six months in darkness.

The sources of the “plague-cloud,” as Ruskin called it, are the industrial and the domestic chimney. The former is a flagrant and notorious but almost universally ignored offender, the Lancashire proverb that “where there’s reek there’s brass” being in general honour. The domestic chimney, however, is the chief offender, and that which is condemned officially in the report now before us. It is estimated that in London every morning some 600,000 women (not 6,000, as was reported by an error of transmission from my recent lecture to the Sociological Society) get up to light a fire, and the diurnal curve of atmospheric pollution in London clearly indicates the results of the destructive and superfluous drudgery to which this army of Englishwomen is doomed by our stupidity. Ever since 1902, occasional articles on this subject have been met by the argument, which I did not accept but which usually contented other people, that it would cost far too much to “recondition” the nation’s houses as for the combustion of smokeless fuels. Now, however, we are setting ourselves to the building of many hundreds of thousands of new houses, and for more than nine months have been protesting that we should not follow, in this instance, the policy which Lord Fisher alleges in the case of our new battleships, “built to last a hundred years and be obsolete in five.” Certainly I cannot believe that, in another decade, we shall be able to afford the present waste of our national source of energy, even if, by that time, any woman remains, whose work never ends in what was once “England’s green and pleasant land.”