DEATH TRAPS.

DEATH TRAPS.-UNIVERSITY TERMS AND MR. RHODES’S LEGACIES.

1202

We have institution which must regarded hospital holy not be criticised ; on the contrary, we have always been prompt to find fault where fault existed, but our critici-ms have always been directed towards amendment. We recommend our lay contemporaries, who have been very severe on the Royal Portsmouth Hospital, to remember that the only way to amend the existing faults at the hospital is to rebuild the place. To do this a large sum of money is required, and the only way in which it can be obtained is by generous public support. The journals which give circulation to incorrect and exaggerated statements with regard to mismanagement of hospitals and carelessness of hospital authorities are not serving the best interests either of those hospitals or of the public which looks to them for help in time of need. It is of no use to call attention to deficiencies which are onlv to be remedied by public support in such a way as to alienate public support. And that is what has been done in some with regard to the Royal Portsmouth Hospital, for the purpose reconstruction will

that the

Commission of which he was chairman had recommended a "permanent and not an elected body," because it was thought that a representative body would be subject to pressure from the ratepayers and that the good conduct of the undertaking might thereby be injured. Those who believe in the infallibility of the London County Council and hold with Mr. Dickinson, a member of that body, that "representatives of are ipso facto naturally endued with wisdom, dislike the Government Bill because the provision of water is not made a matter for their own unfettered control. Lord Llandaff on the contrary disapproves of direct popular control, and therefore the Government Bill, which provides for an elected controlling body, does not embody his recommendations. We must point out that it should not be supposed that because the Bill pleases no one it ought to be taken for granted that it must necessarily be a good one. Such an idea is a popular fallacy. We have given reasons why the Bill should not be passed and we regret that up to the present time the people of Kent are, as far as we know, the only water consumers who have taken any intelligent action in a matter which" so deeply concerns all the inhabitants of " Water London."

never

the people"

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as

commence.

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I quarters

THE TYRANNY OF THE

DOMESTIC SERVANT

A CORRESPONDENT writes to us concerning what is rightly called a disgusting habit and a constant danger to healthy and sick alike." She refers to the habit which housemaids and chambermaids have of "taking some old towel round with them and wiping all the bedroom utensils

’

DEATH TRAPS. come when some means should be taken

THE time is surely to avoid such a palpable waste of life as occurred in the fire with it ; they take it from room to room and everyone shares at Hackney on the night of April 19th. The cause was the alike."" Our correspondent maintains that this custom old one-namely, the built-out shop. Such built-out shops exists in all houses, whether private houses, lodging-houses, are nothing more or less than death traps and they exist in or boarding-houses. We cannot help thinking that our nearly all the roads leading out of London. The Brompton- correspondent’s experience of private houses is a some. road is full of them, so, too, is the Edgware-road, and their what unfortunate one but she says that she has over construction ought never to have been allowed. The history, and over again seen the practice described. It is at of course, is obvious. There is a house with a garden in first sight a filthy habit and yet except in the caee front of it belonging to, or inhabited by, one family. In of illness, to which we shall presently refer, it ought course of time the garden, owing to the ever onward march of not to be a source of danger or of disgust. Any London, becomes too smutty and dirty for a garden so that the housemaid who knows her business, after emptying the owner thinks that he may as well get some more rent out of basins and the other bedroom utensils, gives them a thorough the property by filling up the garden with a shop. The only rinsing with clean water. If this is done very little remains entrance to, or exit from, the house is through this shop and to be wiped off except a film of clean water. Water-bottles if the shop catches fire the inhabitants of the house are practi- and tumblers should, of course, be cleansed separately. But cally doomed. This is what happened at Hackney. The in the case of a room belonging to a sick person a separate shop caught fire owing to an oil lamp being upset and set of cloths should certainly be kept for that room in 10 minutes the house at the back was alight from top to alone. Preferably paper should be employed which can bottom. Seven people lost their lives. If something is not be used only once and then burned. But the difficulty done to make these wretched places less dangerous the same is that mOst modern servants will not do as they are told. kind of accident will happen again. It is, we suppose, Take the average cook, for instance. She utterly declines to impossible to pull down all the built-out shops in London, weigh materials for cooking ; she will not roast meat but but at all events it is not impossible to get an ordinance of preters to put it in the oven, or if, as a great favour, he Parliament or of the London County Council to make it puts it in front of the fire she is too lazy to baste it or to obligatory upon every owner of one of these death traps to put a screen round it. But as regards cleanliness in bedprovide at once one exit at least from the house other than rooms we are far better off than were our fathers some that through the shop. Even a ladder and a trap-door in the 50 years ago. roof would be better than nothing, but some safe method of exit should be made compulsory. UNIVERSITY TERMS AND MR. RHODES’S -

I

THE MANY of

ROYAL PORTSMOUTH

HOSPITAL.

readers may have seen in certain local newsvirulent some attacks upon the out-patient department papers of the Royal Portsmouth Hospital. Having obtained information from the best available sources on the matter we have no hesitation in saying that the case against the hospital has been exaggerated. In particular, the accusations of indelicacy and inhumanity should never have been brought. The buildings which are used as the out-patient department of the hospital are undoubtedly ill-fitted for their purpose. They are the old lock wards dating from the time of the Contagious Diseases (Human) Act and are only in temporary use as an out-patient department, seeing that as soon as funds are forthcoming to replace the building by one properly fitted our

LEGACIES.

legacies left by Mr. Rhodes to his university have rbe to a controversy in the columns of the livees as to given the length of the working year, primarily, of course, at Oxford, and secondarily at other universities and university colleges. In brief, the arguments of the correspondents, who all write on the same side, are well expressed by the iollowing passage from a letter of Professor E. Ray Lankester :— The studious student of a profession. be it medicine, engineering, or other requiring prolonged training, cannot afford to pursue a curriculum which is delit erately arranged so as to require two years of the student’s life in order to enable him to profit by exacti.)7 the same amount of instruction and the same number of working days as are offered to him in one year in every other university and college in the THE

civilised world.

Perhaps the " every other university and college in the civilised world"is a rhetorical flourish, for another correspondent