Licence: In copyright
Credit: Plague in India / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![tinue to be so until the people adopt a more rational style of house building. At present the ordinary mode of procedure is to dig a pit, and with the clay extracted from it to raise a wall on its margin and roof it over for a habitation, the floor either remaining several feet below the surface of the ground outside or being partly filled up with the first rubbish that comes to hand. * * ♦ In no country, however barbarous, is such a style of building in vogue. It has been adopted in these provinces on account of the tenacity of the ordinary clay soil, which thus lends itself readily to the purpose. But if in other countries, where poverty is as much felt as in India, building materials have invariably to be brought from a distance, the same necessity should be recognized here. Again, referring to the district of Fatehpur, he says: Thus for want of skilled labor the villages are all exceptionally mean-looking collections of mud hovels, and the towns which sprang up under the Oudh Nawabs are all in decay. ♦ ♦ * if the standard of living is low, it is more so from habit than from absolute lack of means; large .sums are yearly expended on the only public works which a Hindoo ordiuariy recognizes, namely, temples and bathing tanks. The alluviinn of the wliole northwest makes a sufficiently tenacious clay, and the black soil of the Deccan valleys is even more sticky. The former can easily be burnt into bricks, while there is always red soil suited for brickmaking, or a stone quarry at no great distance from the black cotton soil. When I asked the lumbardar of one of the new villages in the Chenab colony, “ Why do you not have pakka houses? ” he answered, “ We are very poor men.” But, as Mr. Growse said, the poor standard of living is more from habit than absolute lack of means; other countries, where poverty is as much felt as in India (and more felt than in the Chenab colony), oin])loy village masons and carpenters, and thej'^ have shown their progress in well- being first of all in the improved housing of the peasantry. This has been the recognized test in .Ireland in the last fifty years, and in Scotland the great advance in the latter part of the eighteenth century was shown in nothing so much as the disappearance of such “ auld clay biggins,” as Burns was born in. Yet in India mud vil- lages have entered on a new lease under the auspices of the public works department. ’> SANITARY ADVANTAGES OF HAMLETS. As to the large, compact, fort-like villages which are peculiarly the seats of plague infection, it passes as an axiom in India that small villages and hamlets may be almost left to take care of them- .selves in a sanitary respect. The axiom is embodied in the Govern- ment Revenue Handbook, and it recurs time after time in the replies to two circulars on idllage sanitation issued in 1888 and 1893. What was thus obvious in times of cholera is not less obvious in the present time of plague. The advantages of hamlets are even more marked m the latter, for the Bheels of western Khandesh, who were among](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22406967_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
