Social Hygiene.—Many of my readers must remember the time when we, the people of England, were all quite free and easy as to where and how we would build our houses, and should have been exceedingly surprised if any person had interfered to find fault with any dwelling, or row of dwellings, that we had thought fit to erect for sale or hire. Many must remember not only the everlasting Irish cabin, with its dung-heap and pig, and its mud floor and its rotten thatch, but the brick cottages of English manufacturing towns, — rows of cottages run up on the clay soil, with little foundation and no drainage, with little windows that would not open in the front, and no windows at all at the back. Some of us used to fancy that it must be pleasant to live as the gipsies did, in a green lane, sleeping on the ground, with dew-dropping trees or hedges overhanging. Knowing nothing of the rheumatism and the fevers caused by grassy couches, and being smothered under a waggon tilt, we supposed such an open-air life to be something very fine. A group of cottages in a nook between hedges, or on a boggy bit of ground, — dwellings for men as dirty as birds' nests, and as airless as mouseholes, and as damp as fungus-beds, were filled with labourers and their families as a matter of course; and any person who had proposed to examine the property, and to order that any improvements should be made, would have been supposed out of his senses.