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Cymro a'r Celt Llundain

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OCCASIONAL NOTES.

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OCCASIONAL NOTES. By N ORICK. I have been cursed with an inordinate desire for sensation and romance, which I not been able to eliminate from my life in spite of a most careful training in Chemistry, Higher Mathematics, Calvinistic Theology, and similar subjects. In my earlier days this desire drove me to read what are called the modern romances of Deadwood Dick, Frank Reade, junr., and other wortbie3, in which one is bound to lose all interest sooner or later. I was also driven to find sensation elsewhere, with the result that to-day I have developed a passion for the reports of Government Departments and public bodies. A few days ago my friend and country- man Dr. D. L. Thomas, the Medical Officer of Health for Stepney, sent me a copy of his annual report-and I have found it an intensely interesting book. It looks all the world like typical official publications—with its long columns of figures and its careful statistical charts, and yet it contains hidden within itself, like a rare pearl in a common shell, a tale of the wonderful miracle of a, great city, and its daily life. It speaks of the joy of birth, and of the sorrow of death, of human effort to alleviate pain and to colour life, of the grim tragedy of birth in the mean street and'the grassless square; of the callous- ness of the great god Mammon, at whose altar the Britain of the twentieth century offers its thousands of child and other victims year after year-all this and more it tells in bare uncoloured prose and naked figures. Dr. D. L. THOMAS, Medical Officer of Health for Stepney. Somehow or other we have completely lost our sense of the value of figures-and inci- dentally, our sense of the poetry of fact. Statistical statements go unread and neg- lected—and as a nation we cease to believe in the sadness of our condition. Dr. Thomas' report, to my mind, is an eloquent sermon on the life of East London, written by one who knows it as few do. I take a statement here and there, chosen at random" 1,217 infants died under one year of age, or 237 less than in the previous year. The number corresponds to a death- rate of 119 per 1,000 births." Or again "The infantile mortalitv of illegitimate children was 331 per 1,000 births That is, one-third died before they were a year old." And again: "69 deaths of persons without a permanent address occurred in the Whitechapel Infirmary and Work- house alone." All this is true of a part of London, which contains some hundreds of Christian churches-true of a part of the capital of a nation which can afford three hundred millions on a South African war- and whose Naval Estimates for the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eight amount to many millions for constructing needless ships, in order to satisfy the whims of invasion scaremongers. Does anyone wonder that I read Dr. Thomas' report with breathless excitement." He and all others engaged in similar pursuits, and not they who make long speeches and windy perorations, are the nations trustees."

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