Please see the [Transcriber’s Notes] at the end of this text.

REPORTS
RELATING TO
THE SANITARY CONDITION
OF THE
CITY OF LONDON.

BY

JOHN SIMON, F.R.S.
SURGEON TO ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL, AND
OFFICER OF HEALTH TO THE CITY.

LONDON:
JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND.
MDCCCLIV.

LONDON:
SAVILL AND EDWARDS, PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.

TO
LOUIS MICHAEL SIMON,

OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE, LONDON, AND OF
THE PARAGON, BLACKHEATH,

I DEDICATE THIS REPRINT OF MY REPORTS:
LOOKING
LESS TO WHAT LITTLE INTRINSIC MERIT THEY MAY HAVE,
THAN TO THE YEARS OF ANXIOUS LABOUR THEY REPRESENT:
DEEMING IT FIT TO ASSOCIATE
MY FATHER’S NAME
WITH A RECORD OF ENDEAVOURS TO DO MY DUTY:
BECAUSE IN THIS HE HAS BEEN MY BEST EXAMPLE;

AND

BECAUSE I COUNT IT THE HAPPIEST INFLUENCE IN MY LOT,
THAT, BOUND TO HIM BY EVERY TIE OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION,
I HAVE LIKEWISE BEEN ABLE, FROM MY EARLIEST CHILDHOOD
TILL NOW—THE EVENING OF HIS LIFE,
TO REGARD HIM WITH UNQUALIFIED AND INCREASING RESPECT.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

The following Reports, officially addressed to the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London, were originally printed only for the use of the Corporation; and although, to my very great pleasure, they have been extensively circulated through the medium of the daily press, there has continued so frequent an application for separate copies that the surplus-stock at Guildhall has long been exhausted. Under these circumstances—believing the Reports may have some future interest, as belonging to an important educational period in the matters to which they refer, I have requested the Commission to allow their collective reprint and publication; and this indulgence having been kindly accorded me, I have gathered into the present volume all my Annual Reports, together with a special Report suggesting arrangements for extramural burial.

From the nature of the work, I have not considered myself at liberty to make those extensive alterations of text which usually belong to a second edition. I have restricted myself to a few verbal corrections, and to rectifying or omitting some unimportant paragraph, here or there, in case its matter has been more fully or more correctly stated in parts of a subsequent Report. Frequently, where I have wished to explain or qualify passages in the text, I have added foot-notes; but these are distinguished as interpolations by the mark—J. S., 1854.

My Reports lay no claim to the merit of scientific discovery. Rather, they deal with things already notorious to Science; and, in writing them, my hopes have tended chiefly towards winning for such doctrines more general and more practical reception. It has seemed to me no unworthy object, that, confining myself often to almost indisputable topics—to truths bordering on truism, I should labour to make trite knowledge bear fruit in common application.

Nor in any degree do they profess to be cyclopædic in the subject of Preventive Medicine; for it is but a small part of this science that hitherto is recognised by the law; and that—so far as the metropolis is concerned, scarcely beyond the confines of the City. It would have been an idle sort of industry, to say much of places or of matters foreign to the jurisdiction of those whom I officially addressed.

In re-publishing documents which proclaim extreme sanitary evils, as affecting the City, I think it right to draw attention to the dates of the several Reports, and to state that for the last five years many of these evils have been undergoing progressive diminution, of late at a rapid and increasing rate; while, at their worst, they represented only what I fear must be considered the present average condition of our urban population.

This national prevalence of sanitary neglect is a very grievous fact; and though I pretend to no official concern in anything beyond the City boundaries, I cannot forego the present opportunity of saying a few words to bespeak for it the reader’s attention. I would beg any educated person to consider what are the conditions in which alone animal life can thrive; to learn, by personal inspection, how far these conditions are realised for the masses of our population; and to form for himself a conscientious judgment as to the need for great, if even almost revolutionary, reforms. Let any such person devote an hour to visiting some very poor neighbourhood in the metropolis, or in almost any of our large towns. Let him breathe its air, taste its water, eat its bread. Let him think of human life struggling there for years. Let him fancy what it would be to himself to live there, in that beastly degradation of stink, fed with such bread, drinking such water. Let him enter some house there at hazard, and—heeding where he treads, follow the guidance of his outraged nose, to the yard (if there be one) or the cellar. Let him talk to the inmates: let him hear what is thought of the bone-boiler next door, or the slaughter-house behind; what of the sewer-grating before the door; what of the Irish basket-makers upstairs—twelve in a room, who came in after the hopping, and got fever; what of the artisan’s dead body, stretched on his widow’s one bed, beside her living children.

Let him, if he have a heart for the duties of manhood and patriotism, gravely reflect whether such sickening evils, as an hour’s inquiry will have shown him, ought to be the habit of our labouring population: whether the Legislature, which his voice helps to constitute, is doing all that might be done to palliate these wrongs; whether it be not a jarring discord in the civilisation we boast—a worse than pagan savageness in the Christianity we profess, that such things continue, in the midst of us, scandalously neglected; and that the interests of human life, except against wilful violence, are almost uncared for by the law.

And let not the inquirer too easily admit what will be urged by less earnest persons as their pretext for inaction—that such evils are inalienable from poverty. Let him, in visiting those homes of our labouring population, inquire into the actual rent paid for them—dog-holes as they are; and studying the financial experience of Model Dormitories and Model Lodgings, let him reckon what that rent can purchase. He will soon have misgivings as to dirt being cheap in the market, and cleanliness unattainably expensive.

Yet what if it be so? Shift the title of the grievance—is the fact less insufferable? If there be citizens so destitute, that they can afford to live only where they must straightway die—renting the twentieth straw-heap in some lightless fever-bin, or squatting amid rotten soakage, or breathing from the cesspool and the sewer; so destitute that they can buy no water—that milk and bread must be impoverished to meet their means of purchase—that the drugs sold them for sickness must be rubbish or poison; surely no civilised community dare avert itself from the care of this abject orphanage. And—ruat cœlum, let the principle be followed whithersoever it may lead, that Christian society leaves none of its children helpless. If such and such conditions of food or dwelling are absolutely inconsistent with healthy life, what more final test of pauperism can there be, or what clearer right to public succour, than that the subject’s pecuniary means fall short of providing him other conditions than those? It may be that competition has screwed down the rate of wages below what will purchase indispensable food and wholesome lodgment. Of this, as fact, I am no judge; but to its meaning, if fact, I can speak. All labour below that mark is masked pauperism. Whatever the employer saves is gained at the public expense. When, under such circumstances, the labourer or his wife or child spends an occasional month or two in the hospital, that some fever-infection may work itself out, or that the impending loss of an eye or a limb may be averted by animal[1] food; or when he gets various aid from his Board of Guardians, in all sorts of preventable illness, and eventually for the expenses of interment, it is the public that, too late for the man’s health or independence, pays the arrears of wage which should have hindered this suffering and sorrow.

[1] Twenty years’ daily experience of hospital surgery enables me to say, from personal knowledge, that our wards and out-patient rooms are never free from painful illustrations of the effects of insufficient nutrition—cases, in fact, of chronic starvation-disease among the poor; such disease as Magendie imitated, in his celebrated experiments, by feeding animals on an exclusively non-azotised diet.

Probably on no point of political economy is there more general concurrence of opinion, than against any legislative interference with the price of labour. But I would venture to submit, for the consideration of abler judges than myself, that before wages can safely be left to find their own level in the struggles of an unrestricted competition, the law should be rendered absolute and available in safeguards for the ignorant poor—first, against those deteriorations of staple food which enable the retailer to disguise starvation to his customers by apparent cheapenings of bulk; secondly, against those conditions of lodgment which are inconsistent with decency and health.

But if I have addressed myself to this objection, partly because—to the very limited extent in which it starts from a true premiss, it deserves reply; and partly because I wish emphatically to declare my conviction, that such evils as I denounce are not the more to be tolerated for their rising in unwilling Pauperism, rather than in willing Filth; yet I doubt whether poverty be so important an element in the case as some people imagine. And although I have referred especially to a poor neighbourhood—because here it is that knowledge and personal refinement will have least power to compensate for the insufficiencies of public law; yet I have no hesitation in saying that sanitary mismanagement spreads very appreciable evils high in the middle ranks of society; and from some of the consequences, so far as I am aware, no station can call itself exempt.

The fact is, as I have said, that, except against wilful violence, life is practically very little cared for by the law. Fragments of legislation there are, indeed, in all directions: enough to establish precedents—enough to testify some half-conscious possession of a principle; but, for usefulness, little beyond this. The statutes tell that now and then, there has reached to high places the wail of physical suffering. They tell that our law-makers, to the tether of a very scanty knowledge, have, not unwillingly, moved to the redress of some clamorous wrong. But—tested by any scientific standard of what should be the completeness of sanitary legislation; or tested by any personal endeavour to procure the legal correction of gross and glaring evils; their insufficiencies, I do not hesitate to say, constitute a national scandal, and, perhaps in respect of their consequences, something not far removed from a national sin.

In respect of houses—here and there, under local Acts of Parliament, exist sanitary powers, generally of a most defective kind; pretending often to enforce amendments of drainage and water-supply; sometimes to provide for the cleansing of filthy and unwholesome tenements; in a few cases to prevent over-crowding; very rarely to ensure stringent measures against houses certified to be unfit for human habitation. Occasionally—but a few lines would exhaust the list, an application of the Public Health Act, or some really efficient local Act, has put it within reach of the authorities to do all that is needful under certain of these heads. But I know of no such town that would bear strict examination as to its possession of legal powers to fulfil, what I presume must be the principle contemplated by the law—that no house should be let for hire unless presenting the conditions indispensable for health, or be hired for more occupants than it can decently and wholesomely accommodate.[2] However this may be expressed, and in whatever laws embodied, local or general, I will venture to say that no Government should suffer a town, either to be without the means of enforcing this principle, or, having such means, to shirk their exercise. Our Constitution may properly concede that local representative authorities shall have their option whether, for sanitary purposes, to fall under a general law, or to have Local Improvement Acts of their own; but, in the present state of knowledge, it certainly seems incontestable that one or other of these alternatives should be compulsory, and that all Local Improvement Acts should be required, in their sanitary clauses, to come up to the standard of the Public Health Act of the time, whatever it may be.

[2] In addition to the ordinary powers—given, for instance, in the Public Health or City Sewers Act, for abating accumulated nuisances and for enforcing wholesome constructional arrangements; a principal requirement of all bodies having jurisdiction for the public health is, that there should be vested in them some authority, enabling them to regulate, in the spirit of the Common Lodging House Act, all houses which are liable to be thronged by a dangerous excess of low population. Almost invariably such houses are of the class technically known as ‘tenement-houses,’ i. e., houses divided into several tenements or holdings; whereof each—though very often consisting but of a single small room, receives its inmates without any available restriction as to their sex or number, and without regard to the accommodation requisite for cleanliness, decency, and health. The inhabitants of such houses, especially where of the lower order of Irish, constantly lapse into the most brutal filthiness of habits, and live in almost incredible conditions of dirt, over-crowding, and disease. See sections of the following Reports, beginning severally at [pages 44], [146], and [195]. Powers for dealing with these evils might be given to Local Boards of Health, most usefully, I think, in some such form as the following: 1) that—in respect of any house occupied by more than one family, if it be situate in any court, alley, or other place having no carriage-way, and be not assessed to the poor-rate at a higher rental than £...... per annum; or if in it any occupied holding consist of only one room, provided the rent of such room do not exceed the sum of ......shillings per week, or if in it there reside, or within three months previous have resided, any person receiving parochial relief, medically or otherwise; on the certificate of a duly authorized medical officer, that any such house, or part thereof, is habitually in a filthy condition, or that from over-crowding or defective ventilation the health of its inmates is endangered, or that there has prevailed in it undue sickness or mortality of an epidemic or infectious kind; the Local Board may call upon its owner to register it in a book kept for this purpose; and in respect of all houses thus registered, the Local Board may make rules for periodical washing, cleansing, and limewhiting, and for the regular removal of all dust or refuse-matter, may fix the number of tenements into which it shall be lawful to divide any such house, or the total number of inmates who may at one time be received therein, may require its better ventilation by the construction of additional windows or louvres, and may from time to time make such other regulations and orders as they shall judge necessary for the maintenance of health and decency; and may recover from the owner or lessee of any such house penalties for neglect of any legal requisitions, rules, and orders, as aforesaid: 2) that—on the certificate of a duly authorised medical officer, that the condition of any house or room is such as to render probable the rise or the spread of infectious and dangerous disease among its inmates, the Local Board may cause the owner or lessee of such house to be summoned before a magistrate; who, after due hearing, or in default of the owner’s or lessee’s appearance, may order the house, or any part of it, to be evacuated of all tenants within such time as he shall judge fit, and not again to be tenanted till after licence from the Local Board given on the certificate of their medical officer that its causes of unhealthiness are abated; and the magistrate may enforce penalties for non-compliance with his order, as aforesaid: 3) that—after an Order in Council bringing into action the extraordinary clauses of the Nuisances Removal Act, the Local Board, on receiving the certificate of their medical officer that any house, or part of house, is in such condition as to be imminently dangerous to the lives of its inmates in respect of the prevailing epidemic, or any similar disease, may issue a peremptory order for its evacuation, and may recover, from the owner or lessee to whom such order is addressed, penalties for every day during which, or part of which, after such order, the house, or any part thereof, continues to be tenanted; nor, under like penalties, shall it be lawful, except after written licence from the Local Board, given as aforesaid, to allow such house to be re-occupied.

Under circumstances like those just adverted to, may be found traces of enactment against offensive and injurious trades. Unregulated slaughtering throughout all London, except the City, tallow-melting in St. Paul’s church-yard, bone-boiling beside Lambeth Palace, may serve to illustrate the completeness and efficiency of these laws—even in our metropolitan area. Here we greatly lack some competent authority, on the part of the Government, to investigate all circumstances connected with such establishments, generally; to suggest laws for their prospective restriction, as to places wherein they may lawfully settle; and to frame regulations—enforceable by any Local Board of Health, for ensuring that all available measures be employed to mitigate their nuisance. Considering the circumstances under which many of these establishments have existed, no one can entertain a thought, that—even for the public health, they should be liable to the tyranny of an unconditional displacement. But if there existed—as undoubtedly there should exist, some skilled tribunal, competent to speak on the subject; then, I will venture to say, it might be quite in accordance with our English sense of liberty, that—after a certain condemnatory verdict by this tribunal, it should be open to the Local Board of Health to procure their expulsion, on payment of whatever compensation an ordinary jury might award.

Again, with factories; thanks to Lord Shaftesbury’s indefatigable benevolence, the law has appointed an inspection of certain establishments, a restriction of their hours of labour, and some care against the dangers of unboxed machinery. And with mining also the law has interfered, chiefly as to the ventilation of mines; but hitherto so ineffectively that, while I write, the coal-miners are remonstrating with the Legislature on the thousand lives per annum still sacrificed through the insufficient protection accorded them. If there be meaning in this legislation—if it imply any principle, the meaning and the principle require to be developed into a general law, that every establishment employing labour be liable to inspection and regulation in regard of whatever acts and conditions are detrimental or hazardous to life. If factory-children are cared for, lest they be over-worked; and miners, lest they be stifled; so, for those who labour with copper, mercury, arsenic, and lead, let us care, lest they be poisoned! for grinders, lest their lungs be fretted into consumption! for match-makers, lest their jaws be rotted from them by phosphorus! And here let it again be noticed, as in the class of cases last spoken of, how greatly wanted is some skilled tribunal, to form part of any lawful machinery which might ensure that, in these and similar instances, no precautions necessary to life are withheld through ignorance or parsimony.

Against adulterations of food, here and there, obsolete powers exist, for our ancestors had an eye to these things; but, practically, they are of no avail. If we, who are educated, habitually submit to have copper in our preserves, red-lead in our cayenne, alum in our bread, pigments in our tea, and ineffable nastinesses in our fish-sauce, what can we expect of the poor? Can they use[3] galactometers? Can they test their pickles with ammonia? Can they discover the tricks by which bread is made dropsical[4], or otherwise deteriorated in value, even faster than they can cheapen it in price? Without entering on details of what might be the best organisation against such things, I may certainly assume it as greatly a desideratum, that local authorities should uniformly have power to deal with these frauds (as, of course, with every sale of decayed and corrupted food) and that they should be enabled to employ skilled officers, for detecting at least every adulteration of bread and every poisonous admixture in condiments and the like.

[3] The proverbial dilutions of milk are not its only deteriorations. Cows are so ill kept in London, and in consequence so often sickly, that milk suffers—sometimes by mere impoverishment, sometimes by much graver derangements. If there were instituted a proper Inspection of Provisions, one function of its officers should be to visit cow-houses, and to prevent the distribution of milk thus damaged or infected. I suspect that a sanitary reform of these establishments would make a sensible difference to the nursery-population of the metropolis.

[4] A chief artifice in the cheapening of bread is to increase its weight by various means which render it retentive of water. The other usual frauds consist in the employment of inferior flours—either not cereal, or damaged and partially deglutinised.

In some respects this sort of protection is even more necessary, as well as more deficient, in regard to the falsification of drugs. The College of Physicians and the Apothecaries’ Company are supposed to exercise supervision in the matter; so that at least its necessity is recognised by the law. The security thus afforded is, in practice, null. It is notorious in my profession that there are not many simple drugs, and still fewer compound preparations, on the standard strength of which we can reckon. It is notorious that some important medicines are so often falsified in the market, and others so often mis-made in the laboratory, that we are robbed of all certainty in their employment. Iodide of potassium—an invaluable specific, may be shammed to half its weight with the carbonate of potash. Scammony, one of our best purgatives, is rare without chalk or starch, weakening it, perhaps, to half the intention of the giver. Cod-liver oil may have come from seals or from olives. The two or three drops of prussic acid that we would give for a dose may be nearly twice as strong at one chemist’s as at another’s. The quantity of laudanum equivalent to a grain of opium being, theoretically, 19 minims; we may practically find this grain, it is said, in 4.5 minims, or in 34.5. And my colleague, Dr. R. D. Thomson, who has much experience in these matters, tells me that of calamine—not indeed an important agent, but still an article of our pharmacopœia—purporting daily to be sold at every druggist’s shop, there has not for years, he believes, existed a specimen in the market.[5]

[5] Dr. Thomson tells me that he has known white precipitate of mercury sold in hundred-weights as calomel, and in one case (he believes by accident or ignorance) as trisnitrate of bismuth. In my text I have endeavoured to adduce such illustrations as I suppose to be most notorious; but I may refer the reader to various interesting papers published, through the last two or three years, in the Lancet (Analytical Sanitary Commission) from one of which I quote the astounding instance, given above, of variations in the strength of laudanum. Mr. Thomas Taylor, of Vere Street, informs me that, whereas an ounce of laudanum should contain about four grains of morphia, he finds the actual quantity varying in different specimens from two grains to six; and that in two specimens of solid opium, outwardly alike and supposed to be of equal quality, he has found the per centage of morphia to vary from 3¹⁄₂ to 10. It requires little instruction in medicine to appreciate these facts.

Again, with the promiscuous sale of poisons, what incredible laxity of government! One poison, indeed, has its one law. Arsenic may not be sold otherwise than coloured, nor except with full registration of the sale, and in the presence of a witness known to both buyer and vender. Admirable, so far as it goes! but why should arsenic alone receive this dab of legislation? Is the principle right, that means of murder and suicide should be rendered difficult of access for criminal purposes? Does any one question it? Then, why not legislate equally against all poisons?—against oxalic acid and opium, ergot and savin, prussic acid, corrosive sublimate, strychnine?

Nor can our past legislators be more boastful of their labours for the medical profession—either for its scientific interests, or for the public protection against ignorance and quackery.[6] Nearly two dozen corporate bodies within the United Kingdom are said to grant licences for medical practice; and I hardly know whether it lessens or aggravates this confusion, that such licences are in many cases partial; that one licentiate may practise north of the Tweed, but nowise to the south; that one may practise in London, another only seven miles beyond it. Not that the licence seems much to matter! for innumerable poachers in all directions trespass on what the law purports to sell as a secured preserve for qualified practitioners: their encroachments are made with almost certain impunity; and—as for the titles of the Profession, any impostor may style himself doctor or surgeon at his will. Even where licences are held, conveying identical titles, they imply neither equal privileges (as I have said) nor even uniform education. The law has troubled itself little as to the terms on which they shall be granted; and the qualifications exacted from candidates—the conditions preliminary to their becoming eligible for licence, vary in so remarkable a degree among the many corporate bodies which are fountains of this honour, that the credentials conferred have really little meaning, apart from a context which the public is unable to supply. It is charged against particular institutions, that their degrees and licences are attained with a very inglorious facility; and when it is recollected that the issuing of such testimonials is a source—sometimes a chief source—of income to the corporations which grant them, it will be felt that at least there must exist great danger of this reproach being sometimes deserved. If a national title to practise medicine is to be granted by several Boards, and if yet the tenure of that title is to determine public confidence in favour of its holder, it would seem indispensable that some guarantee should be given for these several licences representing equal qualifications—some guarantee that the holder in each case possesses professional knowledge, and has enjoyed professional opportunities, at least above some uniform standard recognised as a minimum qualification by all the diplomatising bodies. Indispensable, however, as this may seem, years of endeavour have failed to attain it. What is called medical reform has been agitated longer than I can remember; and more than one minister has been willing to legislate for its promotion. Unfortunately the very magnitude of the evils has delayed their cure. With the constitution I have described—a system of conflicting jurisdictions, of licences without titles, and titles without licences, how could we escape internal dissension? how escape the antagonism, perhaps the jealousies, of rival corporations and of different professional classes? Home-Secretaries have had little leisure to fathom these things to the bottom. Unexamined and unadjudicated by any competent authority, such influences have bewildered public judgment, made statesmen regard us with despair, postponed legislative correction, and maintained us in a state of anarchy and confusion, best to be appreciated when we compare with our own the organisation and government of the legal profession.

[6] Legislative passiveness towards scientific medicine is not the only evil we have to complain of. Surely, in selling Letters Patent for the protection of quack-medicines—in seeming to sanction and authenticate whatever lies their proprietor may post upon the wall, the State demeans itself into complicity with fraud, and soils its fingers with something fouler than the Vespasian tax. It illustrates the curious forgetfulness shewn towards medicine by the Legislature, that this immoral practice of giving patents for pretended cures of disease should have been allowed to continue—as of course it must have continued, solely by oversight, till past the middle of the nineteenth century.

And be it noted, how this reacts upon the State. So completely is our government dissevered from Science in general, and, most of all, from the sciences relating to Life, that, on such subjects, there exists not for state-purposes anything like a tribunal of appeal. The Legislature recognises no Medical Authority. Occasionally this fact stands out in painful conspicuousness, and brings most injurious results. In contested cases requiring scientific testimony—before Parliamentary Committees, for instance, and in a variety of legal proceedings,—instead of the Court having satisfactory power of referring particular questions to skilled impartial adjudicators, the uniform practice is, that scientific men are retained on opposite sides, to support partisan interests. The advantages, such as they are, which belong to this system, might, I believe, easily be obtained under altered arrangements: the disadvantages are glaring. It might be invidious to refer to illustrations of their reality: but it is of course impossible to doubt of the working of this system, that, in so far as it makes each witness feel himself engaged to maintain the views of his employer, it tends towards a moral prostitution and subornation of science. In the interests of truth, it would surely seem desirable that scientific evidence should be tendered, so far as may be, in a judicial spirit towards the suit; either that the technical point should be referred to a technical jury, or that the technical witness should be summoned at the Court’s discretion, should be examined in-chief by the Court, and should be subject only to such cross-examination as may procure the most complete statement of his knowledge on the matter in hand.

Having said so much on the defects and the wrongs of our existing sanitary condition, perhaps I may venture to speak of the almost obvious remedy. ‘Almost obvious’ I say; for surely no one will doubt that this great subject should be dealt with by comprehensive and scientific legislation; and I hardly see how otherwise, than that it should be submitted in its entirety to some single department of the executive, as a sole charge; that there should be some tangible head, responsible—not only for the enforcement of existing laws, such as they are or may become, but likewise for their progress from time to time to the level of contemporary science, for their completion where fragmentary, for their harmonisation where discordant.

If—as is rumoured, the approaching re-constitution of the General Board of Health is (after the pattern of the Poor-law Board) to give it a Parliamentary President, that member of the Government ought to be open to challenge in respect of every matter relating to health. What, for this purpose, might be the best subordinate arrangements of such a Board, it would take a volume to discuss. But at least as regards its constituted head, sitting in Parliament, his department should be, in the widest sense, to care for the physical necessities of human life. Whether skilled coadjutors be appointed for him or not; engineers—lawyers—chemists—pathologists; whether he be, as it were, the foreman of this special jury, or, according to the more usual precedent of our public affairs, collect advice on his own responsibility, and speak without quotation of other authority than himself, his voice, unless the thing is to be a sham, must represent all these knowledges.

The people, through its representatives, must be able to arraign him wherever human life is insufficiently cared for.

He must be able to justify or to exterminate adulterations of food; to shew that alum ought to be in our loaves, or to banish it for ever; to shew that copper is wholesome for dessert, or to give us our olives and greengages without it; to shew that red-lead is an estimable condiment, or to divert it from our pepper-pots and curries.

Similarly with drugs and poisons—the alternatives of life and death—a minister of Public Health would, I presume, be responsible for whatever evils arise in their unlicensed and unregulated sale. He would hardly dare to acquiesce in our present defencelessness against fraud and ignorance; in doses being sold—critical doses, for the strength of which we, who prescribe them, cannot answer within a margin of cent. per cent.; or in pennyworths of poison being handed across the counter as nonchalantly as cakes of soap.[7] Surely, before he had been six months in office, he would have procured some enactment to remedy this long neglect of the legislature, by providing that the druggist’s trade be exercised only after some test of fitness, and in subjection to certain regulations.

[7] Without referring to what may be considered rare—the sale of poison for the purposes of intended homicide, I may remind the reader of the very dreadful facts collected by the Commissioners on Trades and Manufactures, as to the immense sales of opium in our principal manufacturing towns, for the purpose of quieting—and with the effect of killing, children, while their poor mothers are absent from home in their several occupations.

Within his province, likewise, it would fall to be cognisant of all that relates to the constitution of the Medical Profession. The difficulties which have baffled successive Home-Secretaries might soon find their solution in the less divided attention which he could bring to their study. Amid conflicting opinions and an apparent scramble for power, he would soon distinguish where might be the strife of jealousy and covetousness, where a truthful zeal for the honour and efficiency of medicine. I think he could not be long in curing our more scandalous anomalies. Probably—unless human bowels require other doctoring in London than in Manchester, he would manage that a doctor there should be a doctor also here; that no licence for the partial practice of medicine should be recognised—no licence admitting a man to do in Edinburgh what it would be a misdemeanour for him to do in Greenwich. And obviously, in order to this—since a professional diploma is the only criterion by which the public can measure the competence of those who seek their patronage, he would see that, as far as may be, the various licensing bodies exact from their candidates equal and sufficient qualifications; that the diploma entitling a man to call himself Surgeon or Physician, Accoucheur or Apothecary, mean the same thing—imply the same education, whether it be got in Scotland, Ireland, or England; and that any falsification of such diploma, or any unauthorised assumption of the title which implies its possession, be promptly punishable at law.[8]

[8] This check at least seems indispensable, for the reason above given, that a professional diploma is the only criterion by which the public can measure professional competence; and for the validity of such a criterion, it therefore, I think, becomes the duty of a government, on behalf of the public, to provide. For anything beyond this (except in one particular case) the matter might take its natural course. No law can supersede a necessity for common sense in the subject; and medicine, I think, requires no protection. Let my neighbour, by all means, if he desire it, send for a green-grocer to reduce his dislocation or assuage his gout! and let him take the consequences of his folly, in a spoilt limb or in a hair’s breadth escape with his life. Only—let the green-grocer be punishable, if he seek this office under false pretences, calling himself by any title which implies a professional qualification. And, for what harm he may do—let him of course (as would, if necessary, the presidents of our colleges) be prepared to abide before judge and jury his trial for malpractice. But, in strict adhesion to the principle I have professed, that protection is wanted, not for the profession, but for the public, I would suggest one exception to what otherwise might be universal free-trade in medicine. I refer to the case of druggists; who, whenever the Legislature may awake to the necessity of regulating their trade, ought, I think, to be expressly prohibited from the treatment of disease. To an immense majority of our population—to all the under-educated classes, the druggist’s shop appears an emporium for medical skill, as well as for medical appliances. They probably have some vague overestimate of our art of healing, and think perhaps that the several bottles on the shelf correspond to the several ailments they can specifically cure. They ask for something “good for a dropsy,” or “good for a wasting,” or “good for a palpitation;” not knowing how much skill may be requisite to interpret the symptom; not knowing that, to our highest skill, there is no medicine thus indiscriminately, or even generally, “good.” At present almost universally, druggists, with no medical qualification, are tampering more or less with serious medical responsibilities; and the mischief thus occasioned—especially among the poorer classes, is a matter of notoriety, on which persons engaged in hospital practice would be competent and tolerably impartial witnesses. It is because this evil arises in the almost inevitable ignorance of those who chiefly suffer from it, that, in accordance with the principle above suggested, I think it deserves consideration from the Legislature.

Into the hands of this new minister—advised, perhaps, for such purposes by some permanent commission[9] of skilled person, would devolve the guardianship of public health against combined commercial interests, or incompetent administration. He would provide securities for excluding sulphur from our gas, and animalcules from our water. He would come into relation with all Local Improvement Boards, in respect of the sanitary purposes of their existence. To him we should look, to settle at least for all practical purposes the polemics of drainage and water-supply; to form opinions which might guide Parliament, whether street sewers really require to be avenues for men, whether hard water really be good enough for all ordinary purposes, whether cisternage really be indispensable to an urban water-supply.

[9] There are many instances in my mind, some already adverted to, where the existence of a standing jury for scientific—especially for sanitary, purposes might be of great utility. It is an organisation which prevails extensively in France, under the name of Conseils de Salubrité; forming, in most of the large towns there, a constant board of reference for the municipality, in respect of sanitary regulations. Mutatis mutandis, it might become invaluable as an English institution, in respect of many matters touched upon in this sketch; and perhaps with some division of duties, into such as would best belong to a General Board of the kind, and such as might properly be vested in Local Boards. To determine the indispensable conditions of healthy lodgment; to examine the influence of trades and occupations, and to devise the regulations they may require, for the neighbourhood’s sake, or for their operatives’; to supervise the sale of food and drugs; to be cognisant of medical matters; would seem, either locally or generally, to require the co-operations of several skilled persons. But, though I have spoken of such, as indispensable jurors for these subjects, I do not forget that other interests than those of life may need to be consulted. For the fair representation of these, the lay faculty of educated common-sense will fulfil an inestimable usefulness, if it may be there to mediate between science, which is sometimes crotchety, and trade, which is sometimes selfish.

Organisations against epidemic diseases—questions of quarantine—laws for vaccination, and the like, would obviously lie within his province; and thither, perhaps, also his colleagues might be glad to transfer many of those medical questions which now belong to other departments of the executive—the sanitary regulation of emigrant ships, the ventilation of mines, the medical inspection of factories and prisons, the insecurities of railway traffic, et hoc genus omne.

There is another subject respecting which I should reluctantly forego the present opportunity of saying something. To the philosopher, perhaps, any partial sanitary legislation—even for a metropolis, may seem of low importance, as compared with our commanding need that the general legislation of the country be imbued with deeper sympathies for life. Yet London is almost a nation in itself; and the good which might be effected by its sanitary regeneration would, even as example, be of universal influence. Now, at this moment, there seems a chance—such a chance as may not soon recur—for gaining a first step towards this consummation. The re-construction of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, on the principle of local representation, affords extraordinary facilities for providing London, at length, with an efficient sanitary government. For, while any administration for this purpose would require to be entrusted with very extensive and very stringent powers, it seems probable that such authority might by the public be willingly conceded to a body constituted, in great part, of persons representing local interests. The jurisdiction required would be substantially such as is already vested in the City Commissioners of Sewers, for the sanitary control of the city; the concession of which—because to a representative body—was never any matter of municipal dispute. In so vast a government as that of the metropolis, Local Boards of Health for its various sections would seem indispensable; it is presumed that these boards[10] would be represented in the general Commission; which, in conjunction with them, and including certain skilled assessors, might constitute a complete sanitary organisation, consultative and executive.

[10] It would seem premature to discuss what might be the best constitution of such Local Boards for the metropolis; but it will appear to the reader, on a moment’s reflection, that there would be no difficulty in finding materials for their organisation. If, according to suggestions lately ventilated, municipal institutions should be given to the parts of London hitherto without them; these new corporations would probably have sanitary functions allotted them, and might readily become Local Boards of Health under such a constitution as I have sketched. If, on the other hand, our present non-municipal system were to be continued, probably our several Boards of Guardians might seem specially proper to act as Local Boards of Health; first, as being elected representative bodies, already invested with certain authority of the kind—as, for instance, under the Nuisances Removal Act; secondly, because various of their officers would be almost indispensable parts of any sanitary machinery. Indeed, my experience of such matters suggests it to me as not unimportant, that, under any arrangement which may be made, the jurisdiction of Local Boards of Health should, at least in area, be conterminous with Poor Law Unions; so that those who administer sanitary affairs—affairs which are always chiefly relative to the poor—may, as far as possible, in their several districts, come into relation with single sets of Poor Law officers.

I have one word more to say about the Reports. They have been received by the public with such remarkable indulgence and favour, that I feel some anxiety lest I may seem to have plumed myself with other feathers than my own. Let me, therefore, at least in part, confess my debts.

Before my first enlistment in the service of public health, others had fought this great cause with rare courage and devotion; establishing its main principles in a manner to require no corroboration, and to admit little immediate increase. The true patriarchs of the cause in this country are the present working members of the General Board of Health. The constitution of my city appointment is quite independent of this Board; but I should be acting an unworthy part if I refrained from acknowledging, that, in innumerable instances, I have gathered most valuable knowledge from the Board’s official publications, and that, in personal intercourse with its members and officers, I have had abundant reason to be grateful for information invariably given with that frank kindness which belongs to brotherhood in science, and to sympathy for common objects.

I must likewise acknowledge constant obligations to the courtesy of the Registrar-General, and express with how much pleasure and instruction I have studied the works of his inestimable office. Especially I would offer my tribute of respect to Dr. Farr’s learning and industry, as well as to that capacity for generalisation which the world has long recognised in his eloquent and thoughtful writings.

And, though this be not the place to boast of private friendships, I may venture to say that there are few topics relating to sanitary medicine that I have not enjoyed the advantage of discussing with men who have given genius, inquiry, and reflection to their development.

Thank God! the number of persons capable of apprehending the cause, and ready to take interest in its promotion, is now daily on the increase. If some minister of Public Health could take his seat in the House of Commons—some minister knowing his subject and feeling it, I believe he would find no lack of sympathy and co-operation. The world abounds with admirable wishes and intentions, that vaguely miscarry for want of guidance. How many men can get no farther in their psalm of life than the question, in quo corriget. To such—not masters of the subject, but willing and eager to be its servants, an official leader might be everything: for in great causes like this, where the scandal of continued wrong burns in each man’s conscience, the instincts of justice thirst for satisfaction. What can we do or give—how shall we speak or vote, to lessen these dreadful miseries of sanitary neglect—is, at this moment, I believe, the fervent inquiry of innumerable minds, waiting, as it were for the word of command, to act.

How much of this generous earnestness towards the cause exists in society—how much desire to grasp any reasonable opportunity of good has lately happened to fall under my notice. Last winter, when the signs of the times were making us fear that Cholera would presently again be epidemic in London, it was remembered that, in the greater part of the metropolis, nothing whatever had been done since the last invasion to give immunity against the returning disease. It was remembered—too late, how indescribably dreadful a thing is the epidemic prevalence of sudden death. And the poor were thought of—in their unprotectedness, their filth, their ignorance. Among the persons thus aroused, was a gentleman whom I reluctantly leave unnamed; saying of him only, that, from a distinguished position in official life, he had retired to literary enjoyments, amid which he bears the imputation of many unacknowledged writings which charm and instruct the public. When the rumours of the pestilence began, he too heard and read and became aghast. The notion that ‘in a skilful, helpful, Christian country nothing should be done’ against these impending dangers—that the poor should be left ‘defenceless, huddled together in some dismal district, not more helpful than women’—was felt by him, he wrote, ‘deeply as a disgrace;’ and he pleaded that, ‘on a great and pressing occasion, it remains for the thoughtful, the rich, and the benevolent, to try and do these needful things for the people.’[11] Let us, he urged, endeavour to meet this shameful reproach; let us combine voluntary charitable assistance for extemporaneous sanitary measures, rapid, though partial; let us get a hundred thousand pounds and do what we can in aid of local authorities in the poorest districts—in Bethnal Green, in Shoreditch. Eventually this plan was abandoned, at least for the time. There was argued against it, that prompt legislation might do more good, with less exoneration of local responsibility. Whether rightly or wrongly, the latter view was acted on; and in accordance with it, the gentleman first adverted to (waving his own hopes and wishes in the matter) took active part in framing suggestions,[12] which Lord Palmerston had expressed himself willing to accept, for modifying the laws of Nuisance and Disease-Prevention to a form more suitable for the apprehended emergency. But, in the meantime, what had happened? The author of the plan, as it were at a moment’s notice, had seemed to draw round himself half the intellectual and moral strength of the metropolis. Himself setting aside the literary ambition of his life, he found others ready to meet him with their several self-sacrifices. Over-worked men of science and of business, who afford no time to relaxation; favourites of society, who might have been suspected of mere shuddering at distasteful subjects; men of high laborious rank in Church and State; poets; heads of professions; minds that guide the tastes and morals of the country, or feed its imagination; not least, the invalid from his distant wintering-place; men, in short, immersed in all kinds and grades of occupation, were either bodily present at the deliberations referred to, or were writing about the plan in terms of warm interest, anxious to promote whatever usefulness could be shown them. About the means there was discussion—about the object, none; nor lukewarmness. All were competing, by gifts of time and labour, to snatch some opportunity of serving this neglected cause.

[11] I quote from a pamphlet printed by him for private circulation. It was entitled ‘Health-Fund for London; some Thoughts for next Summer: by Friends in Council.’

[12] These have since been laid before the House of Lords, on the motion, I think, of Lord Harrowby, who took much interest in the subject.

Such—to return to my text—such, I am deeply assured, would be the spirit which a minister of Public Health would find abundantly on his side in Parliamentary discussion, and in the Press. There is no attachment to the incongruities I have sketched as belonging to our abortion of a sanitary system. Still less is there any want of feeling for the poor—any reluctance to raise their state and better their circumstances—any unconsciousness that these things are great solemn duties. On the contrary, everywhere there is the conviction that something must be done; everywhere a waiting for authority to say what. But, the trumpet giving an uncertain sound, who can prepare himself to battle? Knowledge, and method, and comprehensiveness, are wanted—the precise, definite, categorical impulses of a Parliamentary leader, who can recognise principles and stick to them.

And for such a minister, what a career! It would be idleness to speak of the blessings he could diffuse, the anguish he could relieve, the gratitude and glory he could earn. A heathen can tell him this. Homines enim ad Deos nullâ re propius accedunt quam salutem hominibus dando. Nihil habet nec fortuna tua majus quam ut possis, nec natura tua melius quam ut velis, conservare quam plurimos.

Upper Grosvenor Street,
May 15th, 1854.

REPORTS
RELATING TO
THE SANITARY CONDITION
OF THE
CITY OF LONDON.

FIRST ANNUAL REPORT.

TO THE HON. THE COMMISSIONERS OF SEWERS OF THE CITY OF LONDON.

November 6th, 1849.

Gentlemen,

During the 52 weeks dating from October 1st, 1848, to September 29th, 1849, there died of the population of the City of London 3763 persons.

The rate of mortality, estimated from these data for a population of 125,500, would be about the proportion of 30 deaths to every thousand living persons.[13]

[13] The Census of 1851, compared with that of 1841, would lead me to believe that in 1848-9 the population of the City must have been about 129,000. With this correction, the death-rate would have been about 29·16 per thousand.—J. S., 1854.

The lowest suburban mortality recorded in the fifth volume of the Registrar-General’s Reports, for the year then under estimation, gave a rate of 11 in the thousand; and we might perhaps be justified in adopting that rate as a minimum for the purpose of sanitary comparison.

According to this standard (undoubtedly a very superior one) it would appear that, during the last year, death has prevailed in the City of London with nearly three times its recognised minimum of severity.

But, to avoid all sources of fallacy, I will allow a very ample margin to this estimate; I will take 15 per thousand as a fair standard of mortality, and will assume that last year’s deaths in the City have amounted to only double their normal proportion.

Probably no one contends that the lower rate of mortality, as illustrated at Dulwich or Sydenham, indicates an over-healthy condition of the locality to which it refers. Probably no one argues that human life, in those healthier districts, is prolonged beyond enviable limits. Surely, on the contrary, every one who can measure the large amount of misery and destitution which results from a high rate of mortality, will think it most desirable that, by every means within the scope of sanitary science, exertion should be made to reduce the higher rate to the level of the lower.

Therefore, Gentlemen, I venture to assure myself, that I shall but have anticipated the wishes of this Hon. Court, in preparing for your consideration a statement of those circumstances, which apparently conspire to determine the larger mortality of the City of London.

In order to prevent any misapprehension of my remarks, I think it well to observe that, in commenting on this mortality, I purposely avoid instituting any comparison between it and the mortality of those urban districts which immediately adjoin us: for the object of my comparison is not to illustrate how, by similar or worse circumstances, an equally great mortality may have been procured elsewhere; but rather to suggest how, by other and better sanitary arrangements here, our present high mortality may be diminished.

Indeed, while I speak of the causes of that high mortality which distinguishes the City of London from the healthier sub-districts I have cited, it will be obvious that many of my observations do not apply to the City of London exclusively, but admit of equal application to various other central districts of the metropolis;—relating, in fact, generally to the characteristic evils of all urban residences.

With those other districts I have nothing to do; but I wish it to be understood, that in describing the City as healthy or unhealthy, I am not comparing it with Holborn, or Whitechapel, or Bermondsey, or other urban localities, where—whatever the relative badness of the places, the scale of comparison would be essentially vicious, and the results of comparison worthless. It is my object to test the salubrity of the City by comparison with a superior standard, in order that some definite aim may appear, towards which to direct the endeavours of sanitary improvement.

Starting, then, from our Registrars’ Returns, I invite you to inquire with me, how it has come to pass that within the City of London there have died in the last year twice as many persons as it seems necessary that there should die; and whence has arisen the apparent anomaly, that here—in the very focus of civilization, where the resources of curative medicine are greatest, and all the appliances of charitable relief most effectual, still, notwithstanding these advantages, there has passed away irrevocably during the year so undue a proportion of human life.

Let it not be imagined that the word cholera is a sufficient answer to these questions, or that its mention can supersede the necessity for sanitary investigation. Let it, on the contrary, be observed that the epidemic which has visited us, extends its ravages only to localities previously and otherwise hostile to life; so that, while all regions of the globe in succession are shadowed by its dark transit, the healthiest districts of each region remain utterly unharmed in presence of the pestilence. Compare, for instance, the cholera mortality in a healthy suburban sub-district with that of an unhealthy urban one. Dulwich and the parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in the City of London, are probably nearly equal in population: in the former, there was not a single death from cholera; in the latter, the deaths from this cause alone were at the rate of twenty-five to every thousand of the population. Dulwich is one of the healthiest sub-districts within the bills of mortality; St. Ann’s belongs to one of the unhealthiest sub-districts of the City of London; and the cholera visited each in proportion to its ordinary healthiness.

Such is the general rule; and accordingly I would suggest to you that the presence of epidemic cholera, instead of serving to explain away the local inequalities of mortality, does, in fact, only constitute a most important additional testimony to the salubrity or insalubrity of a district, and renders more evident any disparity of condition which may previously have been overlooked. The frightful phenomenon of a periodic pestilence belongs only to defective sanitary arrangements; and, in comparing one local death-rate with another, it is requisite to remember that, in addition to the ordinary redundance of deaths which marks an unhealthy district, there is a tendency from time to time to the recurrence of epidemic pestilence, which visits all unhealthy districts disproportionately, and renders their annual excess of mortality still more egregious and glaring.

As materials which may aid you to estimate the sanitary defects of the City, I subjoin two tables[14] illustrating the relative mortality of the several sub-districts. The first of these tables indicates numerically the local distribution of the year’s deaths, and gives their proportion to the population of each district and sub-district. The second relates particularly to the last quarter, and illustrates the pressure of the epidemic. The two together furnish a synoptical view of the several rates of mortality, as calculated for the entire City, for the Unions separately, for the sub-districts separately; and for the last quarter of the year separately. In the tedious process of constructing these tables, I have been careful to avoid every source of inaccuracy, and believe that they present you with a true measure of the health of the City during the past year.

[14] I have not reprinted these tables quite as here described. The local distribution of the 3763 deaths of the year is given in the [Appendix, No. III.]; and the sub-district death-rates of the year, as nearly as I can get them, in a [note] overleaf, [page 6]. The high mortality of this summer quarter (in which 1395 persons died) will be best appreciated by the reader in referring to [Appendix, No. XIV.]; where it can be compared with the mortality of similar periods of time in the four other years there accounted for.—J. S., 1854.

From these comparative tables it will be observed, that the high mortality of the population does not affect the entire City equally; that, in some of its portions, the rate of death approaches the minimum standard much more nearly than in others; that in those districts where the general rate is best, the temporary aggravation from epidemic causes has likewise been least; and that our aggregate City rate, either for ordinary times or for a period of epidemic disease, is compounded from the joint result of several very different proportions. Reference to the Registrar-General’s tables will enable any one to see that the ordinary rate of mortality for the West London Union is a fourth higher than the rate for the City of London Union, while the rate for the East London Union bears a still higher proportion; and these very different rates are, as it were, merged in the one aggregate rate, struck for the whole City, as comprising the three unions referred to. It will be obvious, therefore, that many parts of the City are much healthier than this aggregate rate would signify, while others are much unhealthier. In regard of last year, for instance, the aggregate rate of mortality was (as I have stated) 30 per thousand of the general population of the City: but if this rate be analysed by examination of the sub-district mortality, it will be seen that in one sub-district the rate of death stood nearly as low as 20; that in another sub-district of the same union it rose to 36, and in a third sub-district (of another union) to within a small fraction of 40.[15]

[15] On account of changes of population shown by the subsequent Census, these figures would require correction. The death-rates per thousand in the several sub-districts were probably about as follows, viz.:—

J. S., 1854.

If it were possible to furnish you with statistics derived from a still smaller sub-division of each district, these points would be infinitely more manifest. In some limited localities of the City you would probably find an approximation to the average mortality of suburban districts; while in other spots, if they were isolated for your contemplation, you would see houses, courts, and streets where the habitual proportion of deaths is far beyond the heaviest pestilence-rate known for any metropolitan district aggregately—localities, indeed, where the habitual rate of death is more appalling than any which such averages can enable you to conceive.

These facts are quite unquestionable, and I have felt it my duty to bring them under your notice as pointedly and impressively as I can; feeling assured, as I do, that so soon as you are cognisant of them, every motive of humanity, no less than of economical prudence, must engage you to investigate with me, whether or not there may lie within your reach any adoptable measures for lessening this large expenditure of human life, and for relieving its attendant misery. It is, therefore, with the deepest feeling of responsibility that I proceed to fulfil the main object of my First Annual Report, by tracing these effects to their causes, and by explaining to you, from a year’s observation and experience, what seem to me the chief influences prevailing against life within the City of London.

My remarks for this purpose will fall under the following heads, viz.:—

• [I.] Defective house-drainage;
• [II.] Incomplete and insufficient water-supply;
• [III.] Offensive or injurious trades and occupations;
• [IV.] Intramural burials;
• [V.] Houses insusceptible of ventilation, and absolutely unfit for habitation;
• [VI.] The personal habits of the lowest classes, and the influence of destitution in increasing their mortality.

In treating of these topics, I shall not pretend to bring before you all the details on which my opinions are founded, or to enumerate under each head those infinite individual instances which require sanitary correction. It is my wish at this time to submit to you only such general considerations as may show you the largeness of the subject, its various ramifications, and its pressing importance; and it is my hope that these considerations may suffice to convince you of the necessity which exists in the City of London for some effective and permanent sanitary organisation.

HOUSE-DRAINAGE.

I. It is not in my power to lay before you any numerical statement of the proportion of drained to undrained houses. From such information as I possess, I may venture to speak of imperfect house-drainage as having been a general evil in all the poorer districts of the City; and the latest intelligence on the subject leads me to consider this great evil as but very partially removed. So far as I can calculate from very imperfect materials, I should conjecture that some thousands of houses within the City still have cesspools connected with them. It requires little medical knowledge to understand that animals will scarcely thrive in an atmosphere of their own decomposing excrements; yet such, strictly and literally speaking, is the air which a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the City are condemned to breathe. Sometimes, happily for the inmates, the cesspool in which their ordure accumulates, lies at some small distance from the basement-area of the house, occupying the subsoil of an adjoining yard, or if the privy be a public one, of some open space exterior to the private premises. But in a very large number of cases, it lies actually within the four walls of the inhabited house; the latter reared over it, as a bell-glass over the beak of a retort, receiving and sucking up incessantly the unspeakable abomination of its volatile contents. In some such instances, where the basement story of the house is tenanted, the cesspool lies—perhaps merely boarded over—close beneath the feet of a family of human beings, whom it surrounds uninterruptedly, whether they wake or sleep, with its fetid pollution and poison.

Now, here is a removable cause of death. These gases, which so many thousands of persons are daily inhaling, do not, it is true, in their diluted condition, suddenly extinguish life; but, though different in concentration, they are identically the same in nature with that confined sewer-gas which, on a recent occasion, at Pimlico, killed those who were exposed to it with the rapidity of a lightning stroke. In their diluted state, as they rise from so many cesspools, and taint the atmosphere of so many houses, they form a climate the most congenial for the multiplication of epidemic disorders, and operate beyond all known influences of their class in impairing the chances of life.

It may be taken as an axiom for the purposes of sanitary improvement, that every individual cesspool is hurtful to its vicinage; and it may hence be inferred how great an injury is done to the public health by their existence in such numbers, that parts of the City might be described as having a cesspool-city excavated beneath it.

I beg most earnestly to press on the consideration of your Hon. Court, the extreme importance of proceeding with all convenient speed to alter this very faulty construction, and to substitute for it an arrangement compatible with the health of the population.

While addressing you on this subject, and while congratulating your Hon. Court on the fact, that public attention is so much directed to a matter in which your exertions are certain to effect large and salutary reform, I cannot refrain from expressing a wish, that more accurate knowledge prevailed among the public as to the history and jurisdiction of the nuisance in question. It seems constantly to be forgotten, that your responsibility in the matter dates but from last January. The cesspool-nuisance has been the slow growth of other less enlightened ages, not in the City merely, but in the whole metropolis, and in all other towns in England. The extreme injury which it inflicts on the health of the population, and the vital necessity of abating that injury, are points which only began to claim attention in this country about ten years ago; and which have since but very slowly been forcing their way (chiefly through the indomitable zeal and perseverance of Mr. Chadwick) into that share of notice which they deserve. House-drainage with effective water-supply, are the remedies which can alone avail; and it is only during the present year that authority to enforce these measures has been vested by the Legislature in any public bodies whatsoever.

Before the month of January last, when your increased jurisdiction was established, it appears to me that, for the existence of cesspools in the City, you had no more responsibility than for the original site of the metropolis, or for the architecture of Westminster Abbey.

During the last ten months, however, the care of effective house-drainage has rested solely and entirely with your Hon. Court; for two of those ten months, I thought it desirable, on account of the epidemic, that no considerable disturbance of the soil should take place in the construction of new works; in the remaining eight months, two miles of new sewer were formed, and 900 houses were drained for the first time.

If the house-drainage of the City had depended for its completion, even since that time, solely on the labours of this Commission, no doubt it would have proceeded at a far quicker pace. How effectively your Hon. Court had prepared for the best application of your increased powers, is sufficiently evinced in the 45 miles of sewerage, ramifying through all the districts of your jurisdiction, ready at every point to receive the streams of private drainage, and leaving to the owners of house-property (with few exceptions) no excuse for their non-performance of these necessary works. I believe the extent of public sewerage within the City to be quite unparalleled, and to furnish facilities of the rarest kind for the abolition of cesspools, and for the establishment of an improved system of house drainage. But, Gentlemen, while you have exerted yourselves to the utmost in the application of your increased authority, and have directed your staff of officers, from first to last, to proceed with all possible despatch in enforcing sanitary improvement in the matter now under consideration, the intentions of your Court and the industry of its officers have been in a great measure frustrated by the passive resistance of landlords. Delays and subterfuges have been had recourse to by the owners of house-property, in order to avoid compliance with the injunctions of the Commission; and the temporary interruption of works, which occurred in August and September, prevented these evasions from being dealt with as otherwise they would have been.

Now, however, the course is again open. For some weeks your Hon. Court has directed that all works of drainage and sewerage shall proceed; many are already in progress; and I can see no reason why, within a year from the present time, the number of cesspools and of undrained houses within the City of London should not be reduced to a very small proportion.

Everything, however, in this respect will depend on the spirit of thoroughness with which the Act of Parliament is enforced; and I would strongly recommend, in all cases of non-drainage or other non-compliance with the terms of notice, that no indulgence whatever should be conceded to landlords beyond the time specified in the notification of the Court; that no difference should be recognised between a ‘notice’ and ‘a peremptory notice;’ that all notices should be ‘peremptory;’ and that, a certain period for performance having been allowed to the landlord, on the very day of that period’s expiration, the work, if undone, should be given over for completion by the workmen of the Commissioners of Sewers, in accordance with the 61st clause of the Act of Parliament. In favour of the adoption of this principle, I can adduce no stronger argument than my conviction, that its non-adoption would insure a sacrifice of human life, in exact proportion to the procrastination allowed; and that, too, in a matter where henceforth your responsibility is undivided and your power absolute.

In order to give efficiency to whatever improvements of house-drainage may be instituted, the present system of water-supply will require to undergo very extensive modifications; for at present in the poorer tenements, even where some show of house-drainage is made, the arrangements are constantly rendered inoperative from insufficiency or absence of water. To this matter, however, I shall presently revert.

Another most important desideratum in connexion with the sewerage of the City is that, if possible, some more perfect system of trapping should be devised, or that, in some way or other, the sewers should be ventilated effectively and inoffensively.[16] At present there are frequent complaints of offensive exhalation from gratings in the open ways of the City; and it will be obvious to your Hon. Court, that all which I have urged on the subject of cesspool-exhalations must apply equally to those which are emitted from sewers. The impediments to effective trapping are almost insuperable; but I believe that when the water-supply of the City is very largely increased, washing the drains amply and incessantly, the evil complained of will undergo a sensible diminution.

[16] This subject is adverted to, with more detail, in the next year’s Report.—See [page 104].

In further connexion with my present subject, I would also solicit attention to the fact that the sanitary purposes of drainage are but imperfectly achieved, where the outfall of sewerage is into a tidal river passing through the heart of a densely peopled metropolis. I should be stepping beyond my province, if I were to say much respecting the schemes now before the public for dealing with the difficulty to which I here refer, inasmuch as those schemes involve questions of engineering and machinery, on which I am incompetent to form an opinion. But I can have no hesitation in stating it as a matter greatly to be desired in the City of London, that the noble river which ebbs and flows beneath its dwellings should cease to be the drainpool of our vast metropolis; and that the immeasurable filth which now pollutes the stream should be intercepted in its course, and be conveyed to some distant destination, where instead of breeding sickness and mortality, it might become a source of agricultural increase and national wealth.[17]

[17] This subject is more particularly dwelt upon in the last Report; [page 261].

I would venture, likewise, to express an opinion that the City of London is peculiarly interested in the accomplishment of this great public work, not only on general grounds relating to the conservancy of the river, but likewise and especially on sanitary grounds, by reason of the large bank-side population, subjects of the City, who now, instead of deriving advantage from their nearness to the stream, are constantly disgusted and injured by its misuse.

While the consideration of this most important measure is pending, I would invite attention to some circumstances, by which even the present evil is needlessly aggravated.

In the first place the sewers are of defective length, so that during the ebb of the tide their contents, as they escape, are suffered to flow in a stream of some length across the mud of the retreating river. The stream, together with the mud which it saturates, and the open mouth of the sewer, evolve copious and offensive exhalations, and I would recommend that measures be taken for abatement of the nuisance. This purpose, as concerns the sewer, would be fulfilled by the addition, in each instance, of a sufficient length of brick or cast-iron work, to prolong the canal beyond low water mark; but the great extent of mud which is left uncovered at each tide, and which during the present pollution of the river is a source of extreme nuisance and of disease, constitutes an evil for which no remedy can be found till the stream shall be narrowed and embanked.

Meanwhile, the complaints which reached the Committee of Health during the summer, together with the results of my own inspection, lead me to believe that the several small docks which lie along the City bank of the river from the Tower to the Temple, fulfil little really useful purpose; that they are to a great extent used as laystalls for their vicinage; that copious deposits and accumulations of filth take place in them; that they are a nuisance and injury, except to the very few who are interested in their maintenance; and that it would be of public advantage that they should be filled up.

WATER-SUPPLY.

II. I am sure that I do not exaggerate the sanitary importance of water, when I affirm that its unrestricted supply is the first essential of decency, of comfort, and of health; that no civilization of the poorer classes can exist without it; and that any limitation to its use in the metropolis is a barrier, which must maintain thousands in a state of the most unwholesome filth and degradation.

In the City of London the supply of water is but a fraction of what it should be. Thousands of the population have no supply of it to the houses where they dwell. For their possession of this first necessary of social life, such persons wholly depend on their power of attending at some fixed hour of the day, pail in hand, beside the nearest stand-cock; where, with their neighbours, they wait their turn—sometimes not without a struggle, during the tedious dribbling of a single small pipe. Sometimes there is a partial improvement on this plan; a group of houses will have a butt or cistern for the common use of some scores of inmates, who thus are saved the necessity of waiting at a standcock, but who still remain most insufficiently supplied with water. Next in the scale of improvement we find water-pipes laid on to the houses; but the water is turned on only for a few hours in the week, so that all who care to be adequately supplied with it must be provided with very spacious receptacles. Receptacles are sometimes provided: and in these, which are often of the most objectionable description, water is retained for the purposes of diet and washing, during a period which varies from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. One of the most important purposes of a water-supply seems almost wholly abandoned—that, namely, of having a large quantity daily devoted to cleanse and clear the house-drains and sewers; and in many cases where a waste-pipe has been conducted from the water-butt to the privy, the arrangement is one which gives to the drainage little advantage of water, while it communicates to the water a well-marked flavour of drainage.

I consider the system of intermittent water-supply to be radically bad; not only because it is a system of stint in what ought to be lavishly bestowed, but also because of the necessity which it creates that large and extensive receptacles should be provided, and because of the liability to contamination incurred by water which has to be retained often during a considerable period. In inspecting the courts and alleys of the City, one constantly sees butts, for the reception of water, either public, or in the open yards of the houses, or sometimes in their cellars; and these butts, dirty, mouldering, and coverless; receiving soot and all other impurities from the air; absorbing stench from the adjacent cesspool; inviting filth from insects, vermin, sparrows, cats, and children; their contents often augmented through a rain water-pipe by the washings of the roof, and every hour becoming fustier and more offensive. Nothing can be less like what water should be than the fluid obtained under such circumstances; and one hardly knows whether this arrangement can be considered preferable to the precarious chance of scuffling or dawdling at a standcock. It may be doubted, too, whether, even in a far better class of houses, the tenants’ water-supply can be pronounced good. The cisternage is better, and all arrangements connected with it are generally such as to protect it from the grosser impurities which defile the water-butts of the poor; but the long retention of water in leaden cisterns impairs its fitness for drinking; and the quantity which any moderate cistern will contain is very generally insufficient for the legitimate requirements of the house during the intervals of supply. Every one who is personally familiar with the working of this system of intermittent supply, can testify to its inconvenience; and though its evils press with immeasurably greater severity on the poor than on the rich, yet the latter are by no means without experience on the subject.

The following are the chief conditions in respect of water supply, which peremptorily require to be fulfilled:—

1. That every house should be separately supplied with water, and that where the house is a lodging-house, or where the several floors are let as separate tenements, the supply of water should extend to each inhabited floor.

2. That every privy should have a supply of water, applicable as often as it may be required, and sufficient in volume to effect, at each application, a thorough flushing and purification of the discharge-pipe of the privy.

3. That in every court, at the point remotest from the sewer-grating, there should be a standcock for the cleansing of the court; and

4. That at all these points there should always and uninterruptedly be a sufficiency of water to fulfil all reasonable requirements of the population.

Now, if my statements are accurate with regard to the imperfect manner in which thousands participate in the distribution of water, even for their personal necessities; if my statements are again accurate with respect to house-drainage, and to the immense increase of water distribution which must accompany any improvement in this respect—and I am quite prepared, if necessary, to adduce ample evidence on these subjects; if, again, it be considered that the appreciation of water by the multitude, who have so long suffered from lack of it, will lead to a vast augmentation of its domestic use; then, I apprehend, it cannot be doubted that the subject of water-supply to the City is one that requires now to be looked at almost as though it were to-day broached for the first time.

Those important conditions, which I just enumerated as urgently requiring fulfilment, may certainly be accomplished, so far as mechanical construction is concerned, in more than one way. It may be possible, no doubt, in further compliance with the principle of intermittent supply, to furnish every tenement in the City with a cistern of proper dimensions, and with its usual appurtenances of ballcock, waste-pipe, &c.; but this, I need hardly say, would be a process involving a vast expenditure of money, and hardly to be recommended on the mere ground of conformity with what has hitherto been done in the matter. It may be possible, on the other hand, to convert the whole water-supply of the City into a system of uninterrupted supply, and to construct all new works in conformity with this system.

I beg to suggest that the choice between these alternatives is one of immense and very urgent importance to the sanitary welfare of the City; and I would earnestly commend it to the best consideration of your Hon. Court.

The system of a constant supply is now no longer a novelty. In Philadelphia, in New York, in Nottingham, in Preston, in Glasgow, in Newcastle, in Bristol, and in various other places, this system has been adopted; its practicability and its advantages have been amply demonstrated.[18] Five years ago, when evidence on the subject was given before the House of Commons, it appeared that in the city and suburbs of Philadelphia 25,816 houses were supplied at an average rate of five dollars per house; that in Preston more than 5,000 houses were supplied continually at high-pressure, and that the company was increasing its tenants at the rate of 400 annually; that in Nottingham about 8,000 houses, containing a population of 35,000 persons, were supplied in the same manner; and in respect of many other towns, public experience has been equally extensive and satisfactory. About a month ago, the Sanitary Committee of the last-mentioned town published what I may call a report of congratulation on their freedom from cholera, which had visited the town with great severity in 1832. They detail the measures by which Nottingham has been rendered a healthy town, and the first item in that enumeration stands thus:—‘An unlimited supply of wholesome filtered water, forced, by day and night, at high pressure, through all the streets to the tops of almost all the houses, at a cost, for the dwellings of the poor, of about five shillings per week.’

[18] It seems almost unnecessary to remind the reader that five more years have added infinite additional testimony to that mentioned in the text as existing in 1849; and that, two years ago, in a special Act of Parliament, it was enjoined on the Water Companies of the Metropolis that, within seven years, they should follow the precedent so extensively established. In the face of such evidence—with the knowledge that Manchester has a constant supply and that Glasgow is arranging one, it certainly tests one’s credulity to hear it rumoured that our Metropolitan Water-Merchants are hoping to resist that requirement, on the ground that such a supply in London would be impossible.—J. S., 1854.

On the relative merits or demerits of the two competing systems of supply, I have only to speak so far as their adaptation to sanitary purposes is concerned. In this respect, I have no hesitation in saying that the system of constant supply is immeasurably superior to its rival; so superior, that unless competent engineering authorities should decide on its practical inapplicability to the City of London, I would strongly recommend its adoption as the only one, in my judgment, by which the growing necessities of the population can be fully and effectively satisfied.

OFFENSIVE AND INJURIOUS TRADES.

III. With respect to offensive trades and occupations pursued within the city of London, my task of recommendation is an easy one. To any person conversant with the simplest physiological relations of cause and effect, it is quite notorious that the decomposition of organic matter within a certain distance of human habitations unfailingly tends to produce disease; and every one who is competent by knowledge and impartiality to pronounce an opinion on the subject, must feel that no occupation which ordinarily leaves a putrid refuse, nor any which consists in the conversion or manufacture of putrescent material, ought, under any circumstances, to be tolerated within a town.

1. First, in regard to slaughter-houses, I may remind you that, on the 23rd of January last, when your Hon. Commission first met under the new Act of Parliament, I recommended to you on sanitary grounds, that in such rules as you might make for the regulation of slaughter houses, all underground slaughtering should be absolutely prohibited. It was laid down, however, that your Act of Parliament would not enable you to establish this restriction, which (it was argued) would be equivalent to a direct suppression of many existing slaughter-houses.[19]

[19] Slaughtering in cellars was rendered illegal by the amended City Sewers Act, 1851, and since that year has been entirely discontinued in the City. See [page 192].—J. S., 1854.

Considering that, in my first recommendations to the Commission I ought to confine myself to objects attainable by means of the Act of Parliament then just coming into operation, I felt myself precluded for the time from entering on the subject (however important in itself) of the total abolition of urban slaughtering. Now, however, while treating generally of sanitary improvement for the City, I can have no hesitation in repeating an opinion which I have already submitted to the Health-Committee of the Common Council; and I beg accordingly to state, that I consider slaughtering within the City as both directly and indirectly prejudicial to the health of the population;—directly, because it loads the air with effluvia of decomposing animal matter, not only in the immediate vicinity of each slaughter-house, but likewise along the line of drainage which conveys away its washings and fluid filth; indirectly, because many very offensive and noxious trades are in close dependence on the slaughtering of cattle, and round about the original nuisance of the slaughter-house, within as narrow limits of distance as circumstances allow, you invariably find established the concomitant and still more grievous nuisances of gut-spinning, tripe-dressing, bone-boiling, tallow-melting, paunch-cooking, &c. Ready illustrations of this fact may be found in the gut-scraping sheds of Harrow-alley, adjoining Butchers’-row, Aldgate; or in the Leadenhall skin-market, contiguous to the slaughtering places, where the stinking hides of cattle lie for many hours together, spread out over a large area of ground, waiting for sale, to the great offence of the neighbourhood.

Such evils as those to which I have adverted are inseparable from the process of slaughtering, however carefully and cleanlily conducted; and they may easily be aggravated to an unlimited extent by defects in drainage, in water supply, or in ventilation, or by the slovenly habits and impunctuality of those to whom the removal of filth and offal is intrusted.

In short, I believe it to be quite impossible, so to conduct the process of slaughtering within the City of London as to remove it from the category of nuisances, or to render it harmless to the health of the population; and I believe it to be equally impossible so to superintend the details of its performance as to prevent them, where ill-administered, from rising into considerable and fatal importance among the promoting causes of epidemic and infectious disease.

It is scarcely necessary, after this expression of my opinion, that I should say how strongly I would recommend that measures should be taken for the discontinuance of all slaughtering within the City; and that, with the abolition of slaughtering, all establishments which deal with animal matter approaching putrefaction, and all sheds and stalls for the continued keeping of cattle, should likewise be prohibited and suppressed.

The number of slaughter-houses at present registered and tolerated within the City amounts to 138, and in 58 of these the slaughtering occurs in vaults and cellars. How overwhelming an amount of organic decomposition must be furnished by these establishments, can neither be estimated nor conceived; but the influence of that decomposition admits of being measured in its effects on the population, and in the high zymotic mortality which denotes an atmosphere over-laden with organic poison.

Before leaving this subject, I think it right very briefly to allude to an argument which is often objected to the view here stated. The objector looks to a particular district, or to a particular slaughter-house, and says that the mortality of the district is an average one; or he points to Mr. A. or Mr. B.—the butcher or the butcher’s man, saying, ‘Who can be healthier than A. or B.? Surely, if the pursuit be injurious, these men ought to have been poisoned long ago.’ Now, to this I reply;—first, as regards the men employed in these crafts, we have no statistics of any value to decide on their mortality, and judgment on the matter cannot be deduced from some half-dozen cases, known to any of us individually; but, further, if we admit (which I by no means know to be the case) that they are persons of average longevity and healthiness, then it must be remembered that their activity, their out-door exercise, and, above all, their unlimited supply of animal food, are circumstances conducing to give them health beyond the average of their station; and it must be remembered that these palliating circumstances, though they may counteract the evil for those persons most nearly concerned in it, contribute nothing towards deodorising the neighbourhood, or towards preserving its poorer inhabitants from the depressive influence of putrid emanations.

And, as regards the district—although we have certain evidence that organic decomposition is a chief cause of disease, yet we do not invariably find disease generated in immediate proximity to the source of nuisance. Drainage beneath the soil, and currents of air above it, convey the materials of decomposition to a distance; and if the particular slaughter-houses be placed on a high level amidst the surrounding City, so that their drainage be effectual and their ventilation complete, then obviously their influence must be sought for, not so much in any special aggravation of the local mortality, as in certain remoter effects of their diffused emanation; in effects, namely, which are discoverable along their lines of drainage and ventilation, and in the various consequences of a highly zymotic atmosphere generally through the entire town.

2. With regard to such trades as are considered to be simply offensive, and where the evidence of injury to health is indirect and uncertain, I can hardly doubt that a wise legislation would exclude them also from the circle of the metropolis. Tallow-melting, whalebone-boiling, gas-making, and various other chemical proceedings, if not absolutely injurious to life, are nuisances, at least in the ordinary language of the law, or are apt to become such. It is the common right of the neighbourhood to breathe an uncontaminated atmosphere; and, with this common right, such nuisances must, in their several degrees, be considered to clash. It might be an infraction of personal liberty to interfere with a proprietor’s right to make offensive smells within the limits of his own tenement, and for his own separate inhalation; but surely it is a still greater infraction of personal liberty when the proprietor, entitled as he is to but the joint use of an atmosphere which is the common property of his neighbourhood, assumes what is equivalent to a sole possession of it, and claims the right of diffusing through it some nauseous effluvium which others, equally with himself, are thus obliged to inhale. Such, as it appears to me, is the rational view of this matter; and although I am not prepared to speak of these trades in the same terms as I applied to slaughtering and its kindred occupations,—although, that is to say, I cannot speak of them as injurious to health on any large scale, yet I would respectfully submit to your Hon. Court that your Act of Parliament empowers you to deal with such nuisances in respect of their being simply offensive.[20]

[20] City Sewers Act, 1848, § 113.

3. Under the same head, I would likewise beg leave to suggest whether it might not be practicable for your Hon. Court to regulate the operation of establishments which evolve large volumes of smoke. The exterior dirtiness and dinginess of London depend mainly on this cause; and the same influence, by rendering domestic cleanliness difficult and expensive, creates an additional impediment to its cultivation. People naturally despair of cleansing that which a day’s exposure to the atmosphere blackens again with soot; or they keep their windows shut, breathing a fusty and unwholesome air, in the hope of excluding the inconvenience. Now, when it is remembered that all the smoke of London is but so much wasted fuel, it must surely be felt that the enforcement of measures for its consumption would be to the interest of all parties; amply economizing to the manufacturer whatever might be the trifling expense of appropriate arrangements, while it would relieve the public of that which, called by the mildest name, is a nuisance and a source of heavy expense.

INTRAMURAL BURIAL.

IV. The subject of intramural burial is the next on which I have to report, as affecting the health of the City.

In compliance with an order of the Health Committee, I have examined as fully as circumstances would allow into the requirements of the City of London in respect of burial accommodation, and the result of my inquiry obliges me to express my conviction, that the City can no longer with safety or propriety be allowed to furnish intramural interment to its dead.

In all those larger parochial burying-grounds where the maintenance of a right to bury can be considered important,—in all such, and in most others, too, the soil is saturated and super-saturated with animal matter undergoing slow decomposition. There are, indeed, few of the older burial-grounds of the City where the soil does not rise many feet above its original level, testifying to the large amount of animal matter which rots beneath the surface. The vaults beneath churches are, in many instances, similarly overloaded with materials of putrefaction, and the atmosphere, which should be kept pure, and without admixture for the living, is hourly tainted with the fœtid emanations of the dead. For the most part, houses are seen to rise on all sides in immediate contiguity to the burial-ground, forbidding the possibility of even such ventilation as might diminish the evil; and the inhabitants of such houses complain bitterly, as they well may, of the inconvenience which they suffer from this confined and noxious atmosphere.

With respect to burial in vaults, which prevails to a very great and dangerous extent in this City, I may observe that, among persons who are ill-informed on the subject, there exist erroneous notions as to the preservation of bodies under these circumstances. They are supposed, from the complete closure of their coffins, to remain unchanged for ages, like the embalmed bodies of Egypt and Peru; or at least—if perhaps they undergo some interior and invisible change (as the chrysalis within its sheath) that there is no interference with the general arrangement, no breach in the compactness of the envelope. Nothing can be less correct than this supposition.

It is unnecessary that I should detail to you the process of decay, as it occurs within the charnel-house; nor need I inquire for your information whether indeed it be true, as alleged, that part of the duty of a sexton consists in tapping the recent coffins, so as to facilitate the escape of gases which otherwise would detonate from their confinement. It is sufficient to state, that—whether such be or be not the duty of the functionary in question, the time certainly comes, sooner or later, when every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of its decomposition through the air as freely as though no shell had enclosed it. It is matter of the utmost notoriety that, under all ordinary conditions of vault-sepulture, the wooden case of the coffin speedily decays and crumbles, while the interior leaden one, bending with the pressure of whatever mass may be above it (or often with its own weight) yields, bulges, and bursts, as surely as would a paper hat-box under the weight of a laden portmanteau.

If the accuracy of this description be doubted, let inquiry be made on a large scale after the coffins of 40 years back[21]—let it be seen how many will appear! If, on the contrary, its accuracy be granted, then I apprehend nothing further need be urged, to establish the importance of abolishing a system which maintains on so large a scale the open putrefaction of human remains within places of frequent resort, and in the midst of populous habitations.

[21] Perhaps the expressions in my text are somewhat too general; not indeed as to the fact of the coffins ultimately giving vent to their fœtid contents (which is the real point at issue) but as to the time within which this occurs. In the dryer and better kept vaults, a longer period certainly elapses than that suggested; in the worse, probably a shorter one. The sooner or later is of little practical importance: but, on re-perusing my Report, I think it right to add this qualification.—J. S., 1854.

It is a very serious matter for consideration, that close beneath the feet of those who attend the services of their church, there often lies an almost solid pile of decomposing human remains, co-extensive with the area of the building, heaped as high as the vaulting will permit, and generally (as I have shown) but very partially confined. And if it be the case, as perhaps it may be, that the frequenters of the place of worship do not complain of any vitiation of their atmosphere, or perhaps do not experience it, not the less is it true that such a vitiation occurs, and—whether to the special detriment of the congregation or not, contributes to the overladen putrefactiveness of our London atmosphere.

In respect of such vaults, I do not consider that the mere cessation of burial in them will be sufficient; seeing that at the present moment they contain amongst them many thousand coffins, as yet tenanted by the materials of decomposition; and year after year, if left in their present state, these will be poisoning the air with successive instalments of their progressive decay. It seems to me quite indispensable that some comprehensive measure should be undertaken, for abolishing at once and for ever all burial within the City of London. Conjointly with the general application to Parliament, for prohibition of further intramural sepulture, I would recommend that authority be obtained by the City for its several parishes to procure the decent removal to extramural cemeteries of such coffins as already occupy their vaults; or, failing this measure, I would recommend that all coffins now lying within vaults, be walled up in their present resting-places with uniform impermeable masonry. For very obvious reasons, I should prefer the former plan to the latter.[22]

[22] Probably the most successful attempt at hermetical enclosure of organic matters would not reach beyond effecting a postponement of their diffusion through the atmosphere. The true principles for burial of the dead lie rather in recognising their decomposition as inevitable, and in providing only lest it be offensive or injurious to the living. This is best attained by interment in a well-chosen soil, at a depth proportioned to the qualities of the ground; with no pretence of everlasting coffins and impenetrable cerements; but with ample vegetation above, to relieve the upper earth from whatever products of decay may mount and mingle there; and especially with thorough drainage below, so that down-currents of air and rainfall may freely traverse the putrefactive strata, ventilating and washing the soil, and diffusing its organic contents through deeper levels, till their oxidation is complete and their new inodorous combinations are discharged in watery solution.—J. S., 1854.

Intramural burial is an evil, no doubt, that varies in its intensity according to the numbers interred; becoming appreciable in its effects on health, so far as the rough measure of statistics can inform us, only when many interments occur annually, or when ground is disturbed wherein much animal matter had previously been left to decay. But, be the evil large or little in any particular case, evil undoubtedly it is in all, and an unmitigated evil.

The atmosphere in which epidemic and infectious diseases most readily diffuse their poison and multiply their victims is one, as I have already often stated, in which organic matters are undergoing decomposition. Whence these may be derived signifies little. Whether the matter passing into decay be an accumulation of soaking straw and cabbage leaves in some miserable cellar, or the garbage of a slaughter-house, or an overflowing cesspool, or dead dogs floated at high water into the mouth of a sewer, or stinking fish thrown overboard in Billingsgate-dock, or the remains of human corpses undergoing their last chemical changes in consecrated earth, the previous history of the decomposed material is of no moment whatever. The pathologist knows no difference of operation between one decaying substance and another; so soon as he recognises organic matter undergoing decomposition, so soon he recognises the most fertile soil for the increase of epidemic diseases; and I may state with certainty, that there are many churchyards in the City of London where every spadeful of soil turned up in burial sensibly adds to the amount of animal decomposition which advances too often inevitably around us.

Nor can I refrain from adding, as a matter claiming attention, that, in the performance of intramural interment, there constantly occur disgusting incidents dependent on overcrowdedness of the burial-ground; incidents which convert the extremest solemnity of religion into an occasion for sickness or horror; perhaps mingling with the ritual of the Church some clamour of gravediggers who have mis-calculated their space; perhaps diffusing amidst the mourners some nauseous evidence and conviction, that a prior tenant of the tomb has been prematurely displaced, or that the spade has impatiently anticipated the slower dismembering of decay. Cases of this nature are fresh in the memory of the public; cases of extreme nuisance and brutal desecration in place of decent and solemn interment; and it is unnecessary that I should revive the record of transactions inconsistent with even the dawn of civilisation.[23]

[23] It happened that during the few months preceding the presentation of this Report, there had occurred some of the most flagrant and disgusting illustrations of the evils adverted to.—J. S., 1854.

From the circumstances which I have mentioned, it can hardly fail to appear most desirable to you, that the use of some spacious and open cemetery at a distance from the City should be substituted for the present system of intramural interment, and the urgency of this requirement will be demonstrated all the more cogently, when it is remembered that the annual amount of mortality in the City averages above 3000, and that under the present arrangements every dead body buried within our walls receives its accommodation at the expense of the living, and to their great detriment.

In recommending that consideration be given, at as early a period as possible, to the means for establishing some sufficient municipal cemetery (a consideration which, for obvious reasons, must be prior to any Parliamentary proceedings for the prohibition of intramural interments) there are three points to which, even now, I think it advisable to advert, as essential to the admissibility of such a plan. I would submit, first, that the site of any such cemetery must be sufficiently remote from the metropolis to obviate any repetition of the present injury to a resident population; and I hardly know how this purpose can be attained, without going some distance beyond the immediate suburbs of London as indicated by the Bills of Mortality:—secondly, that the space required for the proper inhumation of the dead of the City of London[24] would be not less than 54 acres; and, thirdly, I would suggest that the charter of such an establishment ought to contain provisions against the erection of houses within a certain distance of the burial-ground, so that this may at all times and under all circumstances be surrounded, exterior to its wall, by a considerable belt of land totally devoid of resident population. The absence of such a provision as the last would very soon lead to the extramural cemetery becoming intramuralised by the growth of a new suburb around it, and would again evince, by new and unnecessary illustrations, how incompatible with each other are the Dead and the Living as tenants of one locality.

[24] See Special Report on Extramural Interment, [page 285].

HOUSES PERMANENTLY UNFIT FOR HABITATION.

V. Under the last heads of my Report I have touched on matters, which (in so far as they cannot be adjusted without Parliamentary interference) may be considered to lie beyond the present jurisdiction of the Commissioners of Sewers; and the topic which I now approach may, perhaps, be considered equally foreign to the scope of your ordinary functions.

I have to report that there are houses and localities within the City which are irremediably bad;—places, which the uninterrupted presence of epidemic disease has stamped as absolutely unfit for human habitation; places, where drainage and water-supply, indeed, are defective, but where the perfection of these necessaries might exist, in all probability, without giving healthiness to the inhabitants. The predominant evil in the localities referred to is their thorough impossibility of ventilation.

While treating of the manner in which noxious emanations are conveyed to a distance, and are enabled to diffuse their influence over a whole town, instead of concentrating it in some single slaughter-house or burial-ground, I indirectly suggested what I have now to illustrate; that all the evils of all the nuisances in existence acquire their utmost local intensity of action when the diffusion of their gaseous products is interfered with, and when, from absence of ventilation, these are retained in the immediate vicinity of their source.

The inhabitants of open streets can hardly conceive the complicated turnings, the narrow inlets, the close parallels of houses, and the high barriers of light and air, which are the common characteristics of our courts and alleys, and which give an additional noxiousness even to their cesspools and their filth. There are very few who, without personal verification, would credit an account that might be given of the worst of such dwelling-places. Let any one, however, who would do full justice to this frightful subject, visit the courts about Bishopsgate, Aldgate, and the upper portion of Cripplegate, which present some of the worst, though by no means the only instances of pestilential residence. A man of ordinary dimensions almost hesitates, lest he should immovably wedge himself, with whomsoever he may meet, in the low and narrow crevice which is called the entrance to some such court or alley; and, having passed that ordeal, he finds himself as in a well, with little light, with less ventilation, amid a dense population of human beings, with an atmosphere hardly respirable from its closeness and pollution. The stranger, during his visit, feels his breathing constrained, as though he were in a diving-bell; and experiences afterwards a sensible and immediate relief as he emerges again into the comparatively open street.

Now, I am prepared to show that there are many, very many, courts within the City, to which the above description accurately applies; courts and alleys hemmed in on all sides by higher houses; having no possibility of any current of air; and (worst of all) sometimes so constructed back to back, as to forbid the advantage of double windows or back doors, and thus to render the house as perfectly a cul-de-sac out of the court, as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the next thoroughfare.

It is surely superfluous to observe, that these local conditions are utterly incompatible with health. Among their dense population, it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery; and the children, who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit-warren, perish in early infancy. In the worst localities probably not more than half the children born survive their fifth year, and of the 3763 deaths registered last year in the City of London generally, 1410 were at or under seven years of age.

The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born: often extinguishing life prematurely; in childhood, by hydrocephalus; in youth, by pulmonary and renal affections, which you read of as consumption and dropsy; often scarring and maiming where it does not kill, and rendering life miserable by blindness, decrepitude, or deformity; often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation.

Typhus prevails there too, not as an occasional visitor, but as an habitual pestilence.

It is impossible for me, by numbers, to give you an exact knowledge of the fatality of such spots; because, in the greater part of the City, hospitals, dispensaries, and private practice, divide with the parochial officers the treatment of the sick, and diminish the returns of sickness which those officers would otherwise have to show. But this I may tell you, as an illustration of what I mean;—that in the few houses of Seven-Step-alley and its two offsets, (Amelia-place and Turner-square,) there occurred last year 163 parochial cases of fever; in Prince’s-place and Prince’s-square, 176 cases—think, Gentlemen, if this had occurred in Southampton-place and Russell-square! that behind the east side of Bishopsgate, in the very small distance from Widegate-street to New-street, there were 126 cases; that behind the west side, from Primrose-street to Half-moon-street, there were 245 cases; that the parish of Cripplegate had 354 cases over and above the number (probably a very large one) treated by private practitioners, by hospitals, and especially by dispensaries. Similarly, though with less perfect information, I am enabled to trace fever to a terrible extent in very many other localities of the City, even on the verge of its better residences, and close behind its wealthiest thoroughfares; in Plumtree-court, in Plough-court and place, in Poppin’s-court, Neville’s-court, Blackhorse-alley, Union-court, Plough-court in Holborn, Field-lane; in the courts right and left of King-street, Smithfield, in Hanging-sword-alley and its vicinity, in Peahen-court, in Bell-alley and its neighbourhood, in Priest’s-alley, in Beer-lane, in Friar’s-alley, in Bromley’s-buildings, and in the whole large space which stretches from Ludgate-hill to beside the river.

And in most of these localities, in addition to other sanitary errors, there predominates that particular one to which I am now inviting your attention—the absence, namely, of sufficient ventilation.

It was in districts such as these, that in the year 1665, the Great Plague of London found the readiest facilities for its reception; and it was by the destruction of such districts that the Great Fire of the following year rendered the utmost conceivable service to the sanitary progress of the people, and completed their emancipation from the horrors of an unparalleled pestilence. Long intervening years have sufficed to reconstruct these miserable habitations almost after their first type, and to re-exemplify all the evils which belong to them; so completely indeed, that if the infection of that same plague should light again amongst us, I scarcely know why it might not traverse the City and decimate its population as quickly and as virulently as before. Meanwhile, however, typhus with its kindred disorders, and the occasional epidemics of influenza and cholera, maintain their attachment to the soil, and require no further re-inforcement from the pestilence of other climates. From these fatal diseases we no longer hope to be rescued by the recurrence of the former casualty. The almost two centuries which have elapsed since the period referred to, have taught men better methods than a general conflagration for remedying such evils; and it is a satisfaction to believe that the wisdom and humanity of the Corporation of the City of London will apply those methods with effect.

As a palliative measure, applicable in many of the least aggravated instances, I may suggest the removal of unnecessary walls which intercept the current of air from place to place; the formation of counter-openings in various blind courts; and, not least, in regard of many houses thus situated, the admission of light and air by additional windows. I cannot pass this portion of the subject without recording my opinion that the operation of the window-tax is in direct opposition to the sanitary interests of the people; and I must venture to express my hope that some different method of assessment may presently be adopted, in place of one which presses on the occupier in proportion to the healthiness of his tenement.[25] I think it very desirable, indeed almost indispensable, that your Hon. Court should have the power, under certain circumstances, to order and enforce the opening of additional windows in houses occupied by large numbers of persons, when your Officer of Health may report their ventilation defective; and if it should seem expedient to you to seek this authority from the Legislature, it might with the greatest advantage be accompanied by some concession from her Majesty’s Government, to the effect that the formation of additional windows, occurring thus under your orders for the immediate necessities of health and life, should not occasion any further assessment on the occupiers of the house.

[25] I ought not to pass this page without a grateful mention of Lord Duncan’s name in connexion with the removal of the Window Tax, at length happily effected. It remains, however, greatly to be desired, in respect of certain specifiable houses inhabited by the poorer classes, that Local Boards of Health should have power to enforce improvements of ventilation.—J. S., 1854.

But, Gentlemen, within the City of London there exist, to a very large extent, architectural evils for which no such palliative treatment is possible; evils against which I would venture to say (borrowing a metaphor from my profession) that no safety can be found except in amputation.

To dwell in hovels like pits, low-sunken between high houses, hemmed in by barriers which exclude every breath of direct ventilation—this can never be otherwise than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose necessities allot them such residence; and, if it be an incontrovertible fact that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived subsistence in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets, then, I apprehend, it cannot be doubted that such a manner of life ought to be dealt with as a great evil, and ought as much as possible to be interrupted.

A surveyor’s inspection of the City would reveal to you many places answering to the description I have given; places to which no ventilation could arrive except by removal of whole streets of houses which wall them in.

To remove the well-constructed houses of the City, in order that its wretched courts and alleys should participate in the blessings of light and air, might seem one method of conquering the difficulty which is before you; but I apprehend the opposite alternative, of proceeding to a gradual suppression of all residence in the former class of dwellings, may more naturally have your approbation.

To the latter aim, sooner or later, the sanitary efforts of the Corporation must be directed.

There are many parts of the City where great and immediate advantage would arise from an expenditure of money applied solely to the purpose of destruction; parts, where the purchase of an entire court, or series of courts, for the sole object of pulling down houses, and leaving open spaces in their stead, would be the cheapest as well as the most effective manner of dealing with their sanitary difficulties. And I have earnestly to suggest for your consideration, that proceedings of this nature will require to be pursued to a very great extent, and at a large annual expense, within the City, before the cleanliness and habitability of its poorer localities will stand in their legitimate proportion to the modern stateliness of thoroughfare and grandeur of public buildings which attest the magnificence of the Corporation.

I would, therefore, beg to recommend that a survey be made of the worst districts which I have specified, with a view to the immediate purchase and destruction of some considerable portion of the court-property lying in them; and, still more, I would urge that this is an exertion, which for some years must proceed systematically, in order to thin the density of a population which now breeds pestilence and augments mortality by its overcrowding and excess.

I am aware that considerable difficulties lie in the way of accomplishing an object of this sort with immediate rapidity. It is my great hope, however, that the principle may be distinctly recognised; and that the City will not tolerate within its municipal jurisdiction the continuance of houses absolutely incompatible with healthy habitation. This principle being once established, and a certain annual expenditure devoted to enforce it, I feel assured that within a few years opportunities will have arisen for that outlay to have been made in the most judicious manner, and for its results amply to have demonstrated the advantages of the system which I recommend.

SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE POOR.

VI. Last, and not least, among the influences prejudicial to health in the City of London, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition of the lower classes; and I refer to this the more especially, because often, in discussion of sanitary subjects before your Hon. Court, the filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or destructive, or intemperate, or dishonest habits of these classes, are cited as an explanation of the inefficiency of measures designed for their advantage. It is constantly urged, that to bring improved domestic arrangements within the reach of such persons is a waste and a folly; that if you give them a coal-scuttle, a washing-basin, and a watercloset, these several utensils will be applied indifferently to the purposes of each other, or one to the purposes of all; and that meanwhile the objects of your charitable solicitude will remain in the same unredeemed lowness and misery as before. Now it is unquestionable, and I admit it,—that in houses containing all the sanitary evils which I have enumerated—undrained, and waterless, and unventilated—there do dwell whole hordes of persons, who struggle so little in self-defence against that which surrounds them, that they may be considered almost indifferent to its existence, or almost acclimated to endure its continuance. It is too true that, among these classes, there are swarms of men and women, who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle; swarms, to whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms, by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived. Men and women, boys and girls, in scores of each, using jointly one single common privy; grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their married parents; a woman suffering travail in the midst of the males and females of three several families of fellow-lodgers in a single room; an adult son sharing his mother’s bed during her confinement;—such are instances recently within my knowledge (and I might easily adduce others) of the degree and of the manner in which a people may relapse into the habits of savage life, when their domestic condition is neglected, and when they are suffered to habituate themselves to the uttermost depths of physical obscenity and degradation.

Here again, as in an earlier part of my Report, I think it requisite to remark, that I do not mean in any degree to suggest that the evils adverted to present themselves within the City to a greater extent than in sundry other parts of the metropolis. My sphere of duty lies within the City boundary, and it would be an impertinence in me to comment, either favourably or unfavourably, on districts which lie within another jurisdiction than that of the Commission which I have the honour to address. Simply to guard myself against the possibility of being misunderstood, I again draw attention to the fact that I studiously refrain from instituting comparisons with other metropolitan localities. Let me likewise observe that I am far from insinuating, or suspecting, that the majority of the poorer population of the city has fallen to that extreme debasement which I have just illustrated as affecting some portion (perhaps not an inconsiderable portion) of the poorest; but I dare not suppress my knowledge that such instances exist, nor can I refrain from stating my belief, that ignorance and poverty will soon contribute to increase them, if sanitary and social improvement do not co-operate against their continuance.

Contemplating such cases, I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary system can be adequate to the requirements of the time, or can cure those radical evils which infest the under-framework of society, unless the importance be distinctly recognised, and the duty manfully undertaken, of improving the social condition of the poor.

Those who suffer under the calamitous sanitary conditions which I have disclosed, have been led, perhaps, to consider them as inseparable from poverty; and after their long habituation to such influences, who can wonder if personal and moral degradation conform them more and more to the physical debasement of their abode? In the midst of inevitable domestic filth, who can wonder that personal cleanliness should be neglected? In an atmosphere which forbids the breath to be drawn freely, which maintains habitual ill health, which depresses all the natural spring and buoyancy of life, who can wonder that frequent recourse should be had to stimulants, which, however pernicious in themselves, still for a moment dispel the malarious languor of the place, give temporary vigour to the brain, and cheer the flagging pulses of a poisoned circulation? Who can wonder that habits of improvidence and recklessness should arise in a population, which not only has much ignorance and prejudice amongst it, but is likewise often unaccustomed to consideration and kindness? Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?

I believe that now there is a very growing feeling abroad, that the poor of a Christian country can no longer, in their own ignorance and helplessness, be suffered to encounter all the chances which accompany destitution, and which link it often indissolubly to recklessness, profligacy, and perdition. The task of interfering in behalf of these classes, however insensible they may be of their own danger and frequent degradation, begins at length to be recognised as an obligation of society; and as such an interference may be fraught with the utmost advantage to sanitary progress, I shall now proceed to point out the manner in which, with this view only, it may most usefully and most humanely be made.

First of all I would point out to you, that within your Act of Parliament there are contained some enactments on this subject which might be of great value, were it not for their very limited application:—‘Whereas the owners and keepers of lodging-houses of an inferior description, for the accommodation of mendicants, strangers, and other persons for the night, or other short periods, allow the same to be crowded, by receiving more lodgers than such lodging-houses are adapted to contain with a due regard to health,’ therefore, and for some other reasons enumerated in the 91st clause, it is enacted that you may require the registration, and may order the periodical inspection of such houses; that you may from time to time fix and determine the number of lodgers who may be accommodated in each lodging-house; that you may issue ‘rules or instructions regarding health, cleanliness, and ventilation;’ that you may ‘order that a ticket, containing the number of lodgers for which the house is registered,’ together with your rules and regulations, ‘shall be hung up, or placed in a conspicuous part of each room into which lodgers are received;’ and finally, ‘that if any keeper of such lodging-house shall offend against any of these provisions, he shall be liable for each such offence to a penalty not exceeding 5l., and the like penalty for every day after the first upon which any such offence shall be continued.’ The spirit of these enactments is excellent; but unhappily the definition given at the end of the clause excludes from the operation of the law those very cases which most need to fall within it. ‘Common lodging-house’ (it runs) ‘shall, for the purposes of this act, mean any public lodging-house, not being a licensed victualling-house, in which persons are harboured or lodged for hire, for a single night, or for less than a week at one time, or in which any room is let for hire to be occupied by more than one family at one time.’ Lodging-houses, according to this definition, are (I am informed) hardly to be found within the City of London; and the clause has remained, and seems in its present form likely to remain, quite inoperative. If, in any future renewal or amendment of your Act, the definition could be modified in such a manner, that the powers given in respect of lodging-houses should be extended to all the poorer tenements of the City, where the several floors are let separately at a weekly rent, the clause in question would be rendered one of the most serviceable in the Act, and one of the most general application. In its present form, the clause barely enables you to deal with the temporary bed-accommodation of trampers and vagrants,—a class happily not very numerous in the City; while, modified in the manner I suggest, it would put under your sanitary regulation the whole household economy of the permanent industrial population of the City; and, if effectively worked, would conduce beyond all estimation to the physical, social, and moral improvement of that class.

Secondly, and as a matter of even higher importance, I would beg you to consider the incalculable good which may be conferred on the poorer classes of society, by the direct educational influence of those in better and more enlightened circumstances than their own. When I say that all the social errors to which I now more particularly refer, would gradually but swiftly vanish under the influence of education, I do not mean that the cure would lie in learning to read and to write and to sum:—though these attainments, of course, would largely increase the power, usefulness, and market value of their possessor. The education to which I refer, as an all-important influence for sanitary progress, is that which would consist in exhibiting to the lowest classes of society frequent practical evidences of the attainability and the advantages of higher civilization; an education which, by model and examples, would lead them to know cleanliness from dirt, decency from grossness, human propriety from brutish self-abandonment; an education which, by sensible experience, would teach them to feel the comfort and the profit of sanitary observances, and would apply their instinct of self-preservation to the deliberate avoidance of disease.

It is in this point of view, gentlemen, that I would solicit your attention to the useful and philanthropic exertions of three societies which have been established during the last few years, with the object of improving the condition of the labouring classes; and I would venture to suggest that the course which those societies have adopted in various parts of the metropolis, is one that might with the utmost advantage be pursued within the City of London.

The establishment of Model Dwelling and Lodging-houses, and of Public Baths and Laundries, for the use of the labouring population, is now no longer a matter of recent speculation. Under the beneficent auspices of the Societies to which I have referred, the following experiments have been tried:—

The Committee for promoting the establishment of Baths and Wash-houses, having at first Mr. W. Cotton, and then Sir H. Dukinfield, for its Chairman, and including in its number, with other influential persons, several members of this Corporation, founded, at great pains and expense, a model institution at Goulston-square, Whitechapel. In spite of many circumstances conspiring to render this first and experimental establishment particularly expensive, it has more than supported itself by the small payments of the poor; and its arrangements are sufficiently extensive for it to have given in one day as many as 932 baths. This fact, having occurred in the first year of its establishment, shows how much the poor must have appreciated the additional comfort placed within their reach; and I may add that, from the first opening of the building, the annual receipts have been progressively on the increase. Somewhat earlier, and under the influence of the same parent-committee, though specially directed by a branch-committee, a similar establishment was founded in George-street, Euston-square. During the year 1848 the number of payments made here for bathing was 111,788; the number of payments for washing in the laundries, 246,760. This establishment has not only proved self-supporting, but has been enabled to accumulate a large surplus, which is now being applied to enlarge and improve the building. At Glasshouse-yard, near the entrance to the London Docks, there has been founded, on the same model, a small establishment of free baths and washhouses for the destitute poor. It was opened in May, 1845. In the first year the baths given amounted to 27,662; the usings of the laundry to 35,840; and its total working expenses were covered by £378.

No language, however eloquent—no comment, however instructive, could equal the significance of the figures which I have cited as illustrating the great utility of these institutions; and, as regards their pecuniary success, it is impossible to furnish you with better testimony than is comprised in the fact, that the Guardians of the Poor in a great metropolitan parish[26] have recently, out of the poor-rates, founded an institution of this nature. They have become witnesses to the financial economy of that sanitary and social boon. In their establishment, which is not only self-supporting, but amply remunerative, the poor are enabled to have baths at an expense of a penny for a cold bath, and twopence for a warm bath; and the women are enabled to do their washing, ironing, and drying, with an unlimited water-supply, and with other arrangements of most admirable completeness, at an expense of only twopence for the first two hours, during which they occupy the separate chambers allotted to them. A very considerable proportion of the expense is covered by the receipts for baths given at the higher price of sixpence, and with some additional luxuries, to persons of a higher grade in society than those who use the ordinary baths; the former, though used by a different class of persons, being sought with almost as much avidity as the latter.

[26] St. Martin’s in the Fields.

In the sanitary point of view, I probably need not insist much on the advantages which these establishments have conferred. You will hardly doubt how good and wholesome a thing it has been for so many thousands to have had the means of cleanliness; who, in the absence of such facilities, must often have carried about their persons accumulations that one sickens to think of; and whose narrow, crowded chambers must constantly have steamed with wash-tubs, and been hung round with reeking clothes.

Next, very briefly, let me allude to what has been done in respect of the habitations of the poor; first, by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, under the patronage of their Majesties the Queen and the Queen Dowager, with the Prince Albert for its President, and Lord Ashley for its Chairman; secondly, by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, under the Chairmanship of Sir Ralph Howard, and with a committee which, like that of the former society, includes many of the best and wisest, as well as the highest persons of the country. Under the influence of these societies the following experiments have been made:—

In the Old Pancras-road a very large building has been erected, to accommodate 110 families separately and distinctly, in sets of two and three rooms each. Each set of rooms has its own boiler, range, oven, and coalbox; its separate scullery, in which are sink, cistern, and dust-shaft; its own watercloset, its own ample supply of water, and many other conveniences. The rents vary from 3s. 6d. to 5s. per week for a set of two rooms; and from 4s. 9d. to 6s. 3d. for a set of three rooms. The founders of this establishment have recently purchased land at the end of Spicer-street, Spitalfields, on which to erect a lodging-house for 300 single men, and also houses for families.

In the Lower-road, Pentonville, houses of three different classes have been built, on the same general principle of furnishing every convenience and sanitary requisite. They accommodate, on the whole, 23 families and 30 single women—widows, or of advanced age. The entire houses for families, with all the above-mentioned conveniences, are at a rent of 6s., having a good-sized living room, two bedrooms, with additional enclosed recesses for children’s beds, a yard at the back of the house, and the joint use of a wash-house and drying yard. A floor of two rooms is rented at 3s. 6d., and a single room by a single person at 1s. 6d.

In George-street, St. Giles’s, a model lodging-house has been established, affording accommodation to 104 single men, and combining everything essential to such an establishment. The ventilation and drainage have been carefully attended to; an ample supply of water is provided, gas extends through the house, the dormitories are arranged so as to keep their inmates private from each other; there are washing-closets fitted up with every requisite for cleanliness; there is a bath-room supplied with hot and cold water; there are a kitchen and wash-house furnished with all appropriate utensils, a pantry-hatch, with separate, ventilated, and secure compartments for the food of each inmate; in the pay-office is a small well-selected library, for the service of the lodgers, and the use of a spacious coffee-room is likewise for their common convenience. Their pay is 4d. per night, or 2s. a week—an amount little above the ordinary rent paid for the most miserable accommodation in a trampers’ lodging-house.

At 76, Hatton-garden, a lodging-house for 57 single women has recently been opened, consisting of three floors of dormitories, divided into separate compartments, and a basement fitted up with kitchen, washhouse, bath, pantry, safes, &c.

In Charles-street, Drury-lane, three tenements, originally separate, have been converted into a single lodging-house for 82 single men, on the same general plan and at the same rent as that in George-street, St. Giles’s.

All the lodging-houses are furnished; and the inmates are supplied with utensils for their food and other purposes, which must be returned, or made good, at their leaving.

In all these lodging-houses rules exist for the purpose of insuring cleanliness, sobriety, carefulness, and general propriety of conduct; any infraction of which subjects the offender to immediate expulsion. For the sake of those who choose to avail themselves of the opportunity, Scripture readings are appointed to take place in the common room every evening at 9 o’clock; and copies of the Scriptures, with other well-chosen books, are left in charge of the superintendent for distribution among the lodgers, in the hope that they may thus be induced to occupy their leisure to advantage.

In the construction of all these establishments, equally, the greatest pains have been taken to bring sanitary science to bear on the comfort, and convenience, and health of the inmates. Ventilation, drainage, facilities for decency and for cleanliness, have in every instance been made the leading considerations of the architect.[27]

[27] The advantages of these admirable institutions may now be spoken of from longer experience. In a very remarkable pamphlet just published by Dr. Southwood Smith, On the Results of Sanitary Improvement, it is recorded that there has been no case of typhus fever in any one of the model-dwellings since they were first opened, and that their exemption from cholera has been as complete as from typhus. In the Metropolitan Buildings, during three years, the average annual mortality has been only 1·36 per cent. For a lower class of population, very similar advantages have been procured by the regulations of the Common Lodging-House Act. Dr. Smith mentions that in 1308 regulated metropolitan lodging-houses (numbering at least 25,000 lodgers) there had not occurred a single case of fever during the quarter ending the 23rd of October; yet, before they were under regulation, twenty cases of fever have been received into the London Fever Hospital from some one single house in the course of a few weeks.—J. S., 1854.

In regard of these model houses and model lodgings, it would, I think, be a great error to estimate their benefit as merely relative to the number of persons at any one time inmates of them. No doubt it is a great advantage that they furnish, at the ordinary prices of the day, or at a still lower price, so excellent accommodation to several hundreds of persons; and it is a still greater good (particularly in regard of those established for single men and single women) that they drill their inmates into decent and orderly habits, and accustom them to a high standard of household-accommodation, which will probably influence their subsequent married lives in the same desirable direction. But, indirectly, their utility has a far wider scope. They stand in bright contrast to the dark features of filth and unwholesomeness which environ them; they familiarise the poorest classes generally with all the practical advantages of cleanliness; they show that dirt is not inevitable; they therefore create and foster among the humblest members of society, a laudable discontent with defective sanitary arrangements; and they establish a strong public opinion, grounded on experience, in favour of those conditions of cleanliness and comfort, which determine the maintenance of health.

That all the great results of sanitary science can be applied in their utmost perfectness to the dwellings of the poor, for the payment of a rent often below, and never above, the average given for some miserable doghole, that poisons its inhabitants, is a truth of immense importance, deserving the widest dissemination, and pregnant with the most hopeful promise. Such advantages spring from and illustrate the economical application of the associative principle; they cannot be obtained otherwise than by the application of capital, in such an amount as lies only within the compass of wealthy corporations, or is reached by the voluntary combination of several private purses. While the labouring classes are abundantly able to maintain these institutions when established, and to render them amply remunerative to those whose capital has first founded them, it is obvious that no power of association lying within their means can suffice to originate such work.

The task of initiation rests with others. And therefore it is, gentlemen, that on this occasion I have been induced to bring under your notice, as a most important part of my subject, the outline of what has been done in the matter of Model Dwellings and Public Baths and Washhouses. Feeling assured that establishments of this nature are of infinite utility in the several respects I have enumerated; feeling assured that, beyond their immediate operation on the health of inmates and users, they also tend, by their indirect educational influence, to improve the social habits, to promote the civilization, to elevate the general tone and character of the labouring classes, I earnestly recommend them to your attention; hoping that you may either yourselves confer on the poor population of the City the advantage of your patronage and succour in this respect, or else may transfer the matter to the jurisdiction of the Common Council, with all the influence and authority in its favour which your recommendation would insure.

SUGGESTIONS FOR SANITARY ORGANISATION IN THE CITY.

Having now enumerated the sanitary evils of the City, and the remedies which appear to my mind most appropriate for their removal, it becomes desirable that, in concluding, I should point out to you the organisation which seems necessary to be adopted during the gradual transition of the City from its present to a healthier state;—an organisation which may render this transitional period as short as possible, and may most effectually contribute to mitigate, for the time, the pressure of such evils as cannot immediately be removed.

The object of this organisation lies in a word; Inspection—gentlemen, inspection of the most constant, most searching, most intelligent, and most trustworthy kind, is that in which the provisional management of our sanitary affairs must essentially consist.

I presume I may take for granted that, in some form or other, a Committee of Health will exist, either as a Committee of the Court of Common Council, or as one of this Hon. Court. I may, perhaps, further assume that such a Committee will have authority to entertain all subjects relative to the sanitary improvement of the City, and to make thereon such recommendations as shall seem fit to them; and, further, that they will make it their business to receive periodical intelligence, as complete as possible, on all variations in the public health, and on all circumstances likely to affect it.

In order that any Committee, acting for sanitary purposes within the City, shall have a reasonable chance of success in its endeavours for the public good, the following means of information will be necessary for its use:—

1. That an account should be kept, corrected year by year, of every house within the City; as to the area of building, the number of floors, rooms, and windows; as to its ventilation; as to its drainage, water-supply, and other facilities for cleanliness; as to its method of occupation, and number of inhabitants:

2. That from this account there should be made out, at least twice yearly, a list of houses and streets remaining in an objectionable sanitary state; and a list, also, of such as may have been remedied to the satisfaction of the Committee since the formation of their last preceding list:

3. That, while trades injurious to health or offensive to their neighbourhood are suffered to continue within the City, there should be given periodical reports on the condition of such establishments, to the end that they may be so maintained as to be least detrimental to the public health:

4. That a record of every death registered as occurring in the population of the City should lie before the Committee; and

5. I consider it quite indispensable, that they should likewise receive the largest and most accurate returns which can be procured of all sickness occurring among the poorer classes; and (particularly in respect of all epidemic, endemic, and infectious disorders) that the medical practitioner who communicates the fact of illness, should likewise report the existence of any local causes, or other influences of general operation, which have tended to produce, or are tending to continue, such illness.

On the subject of returns of the nature last referred to, I have already, on various occasions, submitted my opinion to the judgment of your Hon. Court. A year ago, in the first Report which I had the honour to make here, and in various discussions which during some months followed the reception of that Report, I stated how necessary I deemed such returns, for the purpose of guiding and justifying the various recommendations which it would become my duty to lay before you. The period which has since elapsed, including its three months of pestilence, has furnished me with the strongest confirmation of those views. As I formerly stated by anticipation, so now I repeat from experience, that nothing deserving the name of sanitary administration can exist in the City, without accurate periodical intelligence of all such sickness (at least) as comes under parochial treatment; or without such reports on the local sanitary conditions, and on other causes of disease, as were desired to accompany that intelligence.

When the matter was previously under your consideration, it was argued that the reception of such intelligence formed no part of your functions as a Commission for draining, lighting, paving, and cleansing the City of London; that all sanitary matters, beyond these and the like, were foreign to your proper sphere of operation; and that your funds, raised by rates from the citizens of London, could not with propriety be applied to meet the expenses of such an arrangement. On this question of jurisdiction and finance I shall, of course, hazard no opinion. I would simply beg to repeat, with regard to so much of the matter as lies within my own professional province, that the intelligence in question is absolutely necessary for the present progress of sanitary measures within the City; that no Health-Committee can exist for a month without it; nor can any officer, having proper respect for his character, consent to be considered responsible for the health of a population, whose illnesses he learns only from their posthumous record in the death-register.

During the recent prevalence of cholera, the Health-Committee of the Common Council complied for the time with my recommendation, and established a system of daily reports, rendered still more serviceable by free personal intercourse between myself and the several gentlemen having medical charge of the three City unions. What needed to be daily during a period of pestilence, might fitly become a weekly communication at all other times. I have already reported to the Health-Committee, and I beg to reiterate here, that the advantages derived from that system of communication were such as could have been attained in no other way.

I may remind you that each of the gentlemen referred to, serving under the Poor Law, works within a certain small and definite district; that he is therefore peculiarly competent to speak on the state of the population in that district, on their habits and necessities, on their customary condition of health, and on their liability to epidemic disease; and that the total staff of these officers, taken collectively, representing the medical practice of the whole city, can supply exactly that kind of detailed and precise information which is most serviceable to your Officer of Health, in guiding him to those more general and comprehensive conclusions which it is his business to lay before you. These gentlemen are the habitual medical attendants of the poorer classes; day by day, in the unobtrusive beneficence of their calling, they pass from house to house, and from court to court—the constant recipients of complaint, or the constant observers of ground of complaint—amid all that destitute population on whose condition you require to be informed. They are in the constant presence of the pestilences which reign in our worst localities; they are the chief treaters of endemic disease within the City—of that disease which, by its proportion, measures the success of sanitary changes, or indicates their failure; and it has been the professional education of these gentlemen, as it is their business, to trace such effects to their causes. Their reports would be the authenticated statements of experienced medical practitioners, familiarly conversant with their several respective localities.

If it were your wish and object, with utter indifference to expense, to organise the best scheme for procuring to yourselves from time to time a succession of accurate and trustworthy reports on the state of health, and condition of dwellings, in the several districts of the City;—if you were willing to engage a large number of non-medical persons who should give their whole time to the duty of exploring and reporting on that state, I am persuaded that this expensive and cumbrous proceeding would have a smaller measure of success than that which I submit to you, and which consists essentially in availing yourselves of the local knowledge and daily observations of a staff of officers, already organised and in active occupation for the very purposes in question.

That such intelligence, embracing weekly returns from the eleven parochial surgeons of the City of London, and including their comments on the local causes of prevailing disease, would involve an annual expenditure of money,[28]—and that this expenditure, sooner or later, and in some form or other, would be derived from the rate-paying portion of the community, are facts which cannot be doubted. But that the expenditure would be a judicious one; that it is indispensable to the effective working of any Health-Committee, or any Health-Officer within the City; that it would be the first step to the mitigation of the disorders reported on; that it would disclose evils which else must escape recognition and remedy; that in a few years it would render our general mortality of 3 per cent. on the entire population of the City a matter of history and a warning, instead of its being, as now, a present and awful reality; that in lessening sickness and death, it would stay a large source of pauperism, would diminish the number of occasional and habitual claimants of Union relief, and would become a measure of real and considerable economy;—these are points on which, with the utmost sense of official responsibility, I beg to record my deliberate conviction.

[28] When the matter was last under consideration of the Commissioners, it appeared that the expense of such an arrangement would be about £250 annually.—J. S., 1854.

Accordingly, I have to recommend that any Committee, which may undertake the administration of sanitary affairs for the City, shall be furnished as completely as possible with information of the nature I have specified.

Another element to which I think it necessary to advert, in connexion with a future sanitary organisation for the City, is this,—that some permanent arrangement should be made, by which the maintenance of exterior and interior cleanliness, the enforcement of scavengers’ duties, the suppression of nuisances, and the like, should be brought under habitual and systematic surveillance; one, by which all breaches of your present or future sanitary regulations may be quickly detected, and may be visited with their appropriate penalties as speedily and as certainly as possible. I am induced the rather to bring this subject before you, as complaints of scavengers’ duties being neglected have reached me at every turn. I am informed that it is usual for them to refuse to remove dirt and rubbish from houses, according to the terms of their contract, except on the tenants’ payment of an additional gratuity; and it must be obvious to your Hon. Court that the arrangements which you have made by contract for this purpose are virtually defeated, as regards the poorer population, when the removal of refuse-matter is made contingent on the gift of beer-money by those whose means are so restricted.

It is in respect of matters of this sort, and of such only, that I think the services of the Police-Force might usefully be employed. Their want of special education, and their employment in other duties, are circumstances which appear to me quite conclusive for objecting to their utilisation as sanitary reporters. But while I entertain the opinion that their employment in the latter direction would be both fruitless and inconvenient, I would submit that their numbers and their diffusion through the City qualify them well to act against all causers of nuisance, as they act against other offenders, both detectively and preventively; and I would venture to repeat a suggestion, which I made in January last, ‘that the police should consider it part of their duty, to report on every nuisance within their knowledge, and on every infraction of such sanitary rules as this Court may establish.’

Here, Gentlemen, terminates the list of subjects which, on this occasion, I have thought it my duty to bring before you. Long as the enumeration may have appeared, I can assure you that my present Report bears a small proportion, in point of dimensions, to the very large and very various mass of materials on which it is founded. In compressing it within the narrowest limits consistent with intelligibility, and in excluding from it nearly all details on the matters treated of, I have consulted the convenience of your Hon. Court, notwithstanding the greater labour and difficulty of execution which belong to the plan I have adopted. At any time, in Court or in Committee, when you may wish to pursue the subject, I shall be ready to enter at far greater length, and with more elaborate minuteness, on any of those subjects which, at the present opportunity, I have only sketched for your general information.

In the matters which I have enumerated, some lie distinctly within your province, as assigned by the Act of Parliament; while others may be thought to lie, just as distinctly, without that province. In affairs strictly under your jurisdiction, and within the present scope of the law, there remains very much to achieve. The complete enforcement of house-drainage, till every house washes itself into the sewer; the more general distribution of water, till every individual within the City has an abundant supply within his immediate reach; the effective preservation of public cleanliness; the construction and maintenance of sewerage, paving, lighting, for all the streets, courts and passages of this great City;—these constitute an immense amount of responsibility and labour. Those other objects to which I have referred, are partly such as cannot be accomplished without the further interference of the Legislature. It is a point solely for the discretion of your Hon. Court to determine, how far you may be willing to enlarge the sphere of your sanitary operations, and to undertake the difficulties of a new campaign.

To your Officer of Health the Act of Parliament allows no such option. ‘Whereas the health of the population, especially of the poorer classes, is frequently injured by the prevalence of epidemical and other disorders,’ therefore it is appointed for his duty that he shall report on whatsoever ‘injuriously affects the health of the inhabitants of the City,’ and that he shall ‘point out the most efficacious mode of checking or preventing the spread of contagious or other epidemic disease.’ Actuated by obligation of the duty thus expressed in your Act of Parliament, after full reflection on all that those expressions imply, and with the deepest sense of the responsibility belonging to one who is honoured with the task of advising the first Corporation of the country in respect of its sanitary proceedings, I have been compelled, in the course of my present Report, to trench upon many subjects which do not customarily fall under your consideration, and which (as I have stated) may by some be considered as utterly foreign to your jurisdiction and province.

It rests with your Hon. Court to determine what course you will adopt in respect of such departments of the great sanitary scheme;—whether you will retain them under your consideration, and will assume the responsibility of dealing with them in proportion to their magnitude and importance, or will transfer them to the Court of Common Council for the less restricted deliberation of that body.

Let me once more declare my profound conviction of their importance to the health and welfare of the City.

To provide an inoffensive outfall for the sewerage of our vast population; to render the river a source of unqualified advantage; to give wide extension and sounder principles to the system of water-supply; to suppress all trades and occupations which taint the atmosphere with materials of organic decomposition; to abate the nuisance of smoke; to provide the facilities for extramural interment, and to procure the prohibition of all further burial amidst our living; to improve the domestic arrangements of the poor, and to insure for them an adequate supervision; to establish public baths and laundries, which may offer the utmost facilities and inducement for the maintenance of personal cleanliness; to hinder the occupation of houses which breed pestilence; to destroy such as are irremediably hostile to health, and to disperse the stifled population of courts and alleys; to substitute for such slums as we hope to depopulate and destroy, but in open streets and with perfect ventilation, houses and lodgings, which not only shall offer to the labouring classes every convenience essential to health and decency and comfort, but shall likewise serve as models of household economy for the whole district in which they stand;—these, Gentlemen, are the aims, briefly recapitulated, for the sake of which I have been obliged, as it were casually in my Report, to touch on many subjects perhaps foreign to your jurisdiction, but lying at least on the confines of your province, and remaining with you now either to retain or to transfer.[29]

[29] Perhaps, to make these passages intelligible, the reader should be apprised that the business of the Corporation is considered in a great variety of Committees, which thus have their several and particular provinces. Of the many matters adverted to, as foreign to the ordinary functions of the Commission of Sewers, some might belong to the City-Lands Committee, some to the Improvement, some to the Finance, some to the Navigation, some to the Markets Committee, and so on. Obviously it would have been out of my place to touch on these details of jurisdiction; and I therefore urged only the essentially municipal character of the several improvements I advocated.—J. S., 1854.

That the subject of sanitary improvement in its widest scope, and with all that even incidentally relates to it, is one which, according to the ancient constitution of the City, rightfully belongs to the authorities of the Corporation, in some one or other of their municipal relations—that it belongs to them equally as their privilege and their duty, cannot for a moment be questioned. And if your Hon. Court should determine on a negative opinion as regards yourselves, and should decide on transferring these matters to the Common Council, I venture to hope that your influence may accompany them in their course, and may procure for them the consideration they deserve.

Gentlemen, the history of the City of London is full of great examples of public service. It records many a generous struggle for the Country and for the Constitution; it records a noble patronage of arts and letters; it records imperial magnificence and Christian liberality; but never, within the scope of its annals, has the Corporation had so grand an opportunity as now for the achievement of an unlimited good. Because of the City’s illustrious history, and because of the vast wealth and power which have enabled it so often to undertake the largest measures of public utility and patriotism,—therefore it is, that the expectations of the country may well be fixed on the City of London in regard of this, the distinguishing movement of modern times—the movement to improve the social condition, and to prolong the lives of the poor.

Those who are familiar with the many abiding monuments of your civic munificence and splendor, may well expect that, in approaching this all-important question, the counsels of the City will be swayed by high and generous considerations.

In the great objects which sanitary science proposes to itself,—in the immense amelioration which it proffers to the physical, to the social, and indirectly to the moral condition of an immense majority of our fellow-creatures, it transcends the importance of all other sciences, and in its beneficent operation seems most nearly to embody the spirit and to fulfil the intentions of practical Christianity.

Ignorant men may sneer at its pretensions; weak and timorous men may hesitate to commit themselves to its principles, so large in their application; selfish men may shrink from the labour of change, which its recognition must entail; wicked men may turn indifferently from considering that which concerns the health and happiness of millions of their fellow-creatures. To such men an appeal would indeed be useless. But, to the Corporation of the City of London—whether as assembled in its entire Parliament, or as represented within the confines of this Court—to the Corporation which, on so many occasions, has attained patriotic ends by great expenditure and sacrifice; to men earnest, strong-minded, and practical, having much consideration for their fellow-creatures, and having little consideration for personal toil or municipal expense, so only that they may fulfil a great Christian duty, and may confirm the gratitude with which history records their frequent services to our kind;—to such a Corporation, and to such men, the Country looks for the perfection of a sanitary scheme which shall serve as model and example to other municipal bodies undertaking the same responsibility; and to such a Corporation and to such men do I, likewise, your Officer of Health, respectfully and confidently address a well-founded appeal.

I have the honour,
&c., &c.

FURTHER REMARKS ON WATER-SUPPLY.

ADDRESSED TO THE HEALTH-COMMITTEE OF THE HON. THE COMMISSIONERS OF SEWERS OF THE CITY OF LONDON, PURSUANT TO A REFERENCE—

“What would be a sufficient supply of water to the houses and premises within the City, and the best principle upon which to effect such supply?”

February 21, 1850.

Gentlemen,

Such further observations on the subject of ‘Water-Supply to the City’ as you have desired me to lay before you, I have now the honor to submit, in as condensed a form as possible.

First, I may remind you, that in my report of last November, which still remains under your consideration, I stated the following ‘as the chief conditions in respect of Water-Supply, which peremptorily require to be fulfilled.

‘1. That every house should be separately supplied with water; and that, where the house is a lodging-house, or where the several floors are let as separate tenements, the supply of water should extend to each inhabited floor.

‘2. That every privy should have a supply of water, applicable as often as it may be required, and sufficient in volume to effect at each application a thorough flushing and purification of the discharge-pipe of the privy.

‘3. That in every court, at the point remotest from the sewer-grating, there should be a stand-cock for the cleansing of the court; and

‘4. That at all these points there should always and uninterruptedly be a sufficiency of water to fulfil all reasonable requirements of the population.’

In re-organising the system of water-supply there are some other purposes, of a more public nature than these, which would likewise claim your attention: such as (1) an improved arrangement for meeting all accidents and emergencies of fire; (2) an efficient distribution of water to all common urinals and privies; (3) a sufficiency of supply for any public baths and wash-houses, which may be hereafter erected; and (4) an ample surplus to be at the disposal of the Commission for the cleansing of streets and sewers.

In order that those domestic purposes, which I first enumerated, should be adequately fulfilled, the supply of water ought, practically speaking, to be without limit to any individual consumer. It is the tendency of the system of constant supply, and constitutes a distinguishing advantage of that system, that it fulfils this important condition without any increase, or perhaps rather with a diminution, of the total draught of water for a large population.

The average of requirement (estimated from the consumption of large communities) would probably be about 12 gallons per person per diem; making an amount, for the total population of the City, of about 1¹⁄₂ million gallons per diem. Assuming this estimate to be correct, a point which I would beg you to observe is the following: that, although there might be very little fluctuation in the total quantity consumed, and although it might remain constant at the figure I have given, yet in the items of individual consumption, making up this gross amount, there would be almost infinite varieties. One family would habitually consume twice as much water as another family of the same size: one family would consume six gallons per person on five days of the week, and would require all its remaining quota on the other two days; and so forth. These differences and caprices of individual requirement do not sensibly affect the total quantity consumed in a given week by a population of 130,000 persons; one consuming more, another less, the first counterbalances the last in forming the materials for a fair personal average; and a source of supply calculated from such an average for a large population would, practically speaking, be unlimited to each individual consumer, provided only that it were so distributed, that each consumer could draw from the common stock at his own time and according to his own necessity. This advantage is obviously lost under the present system of intermittent supply, which compels a larger total distribution than would else be requisite, entails the expensive and unwholesome necessity for storage, and yet is notoriously fraught with the inconveniences of a restricted source, or a defective supply.

I have no sufficient data for judging with precision what quantity of water might be required to fulfil all those public purposes of cleanliness and of protection from fire, to which I have adverted. The supply would require to be practically inexhaustible; but the consumption, on an average of the four seasons, would probably lie considerably within half a million of gallons per diem.

When the distribution of water is brought into its proper relations with the drainage of the City—that is, when the arrangements of domestic drainage are completed, in conformity with the intentions of the Act of Parliament, and when all the water, distributed for private consumption, is made to traverse and to cleanse all the channels of house-drainage, it is probable that a smaller quantity of water than is now consumed will suffice for the flushing of sewers, and for other so-called sanitary purposes.

The quantity at present supplied to the City by its two Water-Companies is perhaps much in excess of the two millions of gallons per diem, which I have estimated as a sufficiency for our population; but the distribution is so unequal, and the waste of the intermittent system so incalculably great, that the effect produced on the population is, to a very great extent, that of scarcity.

With regard to the principle of supply on which I have been desired to report, it seems certain to my mind, from such evidence as I can collect on the subject, that the system of continuous supply at high-pressure promises advantages which can never be realized under the present system of intermittent supply. There are many matters connected with the comparison of these two systems, which lie beyond my sphere of professional observation, and on which I would not be bold enough to offer any opinion to your Committee. The sanitary points, on which alone I would venture to insist, as benefits in the system of continuous supply, are—first, the practical inexhaustibility of the source, and secondly, the absence of necessity for storage. If these benefits are attainable, and especially if (as alleged) they can be obtained at a material economy of expenditure, as compared with the present system, there can be little doubt as to which should obtain the preference.

If your Committee should wish, it would be easy to prepare for your examination a digested summary of such scientific evidence as has been given on these points: or it might be expedient, if such a course would be more satisfactory to you, that some person in your confidence should undertake to visit and inspect one or more of the towns where the system of continuous supply is in operation, and where direct information can be gathered on the very important particulars of its practical efficiency and success. But, at all events, whether your Committee should wish or should not wish this personal investigation to be undertaken, I would suggest, that it might be satisfactory to you and serviceable to the inquiry in which you are engaged, if you would procure a report from some eminent hydraulic engineer, practically conversant with the system of continuous supply, who might furnish you with conclusive testimony as to the admissibility of this system within the City, and as to the advantages and disadvantages, sanitary and economical, which might attend its adoption here, as compared with that which has hitherto prevailed.

It appears to me that at the present time the system of continuous supply might, provisionally, receive a fair trial in the City, in respect of some of those poorer habitations, which are now for the first time about to be supplied with water and drainage. The Water-Companies would probably not object, if desired by the Commission, to supply a hundred houses, experimentally, with constant pressure from their mains. The Commission might select for its experiment some of those courts about Cripplegate or Bishopsgate, where the drainage, as well as the water-supply, requires to be constructed anew: some, where there have hitherto been undrained cesspools, and where the water-supply has been from a stand-cock. Should this suggestion be found feasible, I would recommend that the details of its execution should be carried out under the joint superintendence of your Surveyor and myself, and that we should afterwards report to you its results, as material for guiding your decision with regard to the general supply of the City.

Mr. Quick, Engineer to the Southwark Water-Works, in a letter which is appended to Sir William Clay’s pamphlet, has recently suggested various arrangements for an uninterrupted supply, and these have no doubt been under your Surveyor’s consideration. I may add, too, that there are at present upwards of 40 houses within the City constantly supplied from the mains of the East London Water-Works; but as these are not houses of the poorest description, it is possible that they may not constitute so satisfactory a proof of the feasibility of the constant supply, or so complete an illustration of the detailed arrangements for its employment, as could be given by the experimental construction I have suggested.

While the supply remains, as at present, an interrupted one for the City generally, I would recommend that the Commission should procure from the Water-Companies an arrangement for the delivery to occur, under no circumstances, less than daily; and that Sunday should form no exception to this arrangement. Many tenants of the Water Companies at present receive their supply only on alternate days, Sunday counting as a dies non, so that a necessity is entailed in such cases for a three days’ storage of water.

Whether the quality of water supplied to the City by the existing Companies is such as it ought to be, or whether some purer source of supply may be found; whether their neglect of filtration, notwithstanding the important weight of testimony given in its favor, be not a serious dereliction of their duty to the public; whether the sanitary interests of the consumers of this first necessary of life can be properly protected, while at variance with those of the great trading companies which hold a virtual monopoly of the supply; whether it would not be an immense boon to the Citizens of London, that the control of the water-supply should be vested in the same jurisdiction as the drainage, paving, and sanitary cleansing of the district; are questions which have forced themselves closely on my attention while considering the sanitary affairs of the City, and on which I hope shortly to lay some special observations before this Committee or before the Court.

I defer dwelling on these subjects at present, partly because they were not mentioned in your Committee’s specific reference; partly because I think it desirable to wait for the issue of the experiment which I have suggested with regard to the competing system of supply; and partly because I have reason to know that at the present moment a very extensive series of chemical investigations is proceeding under orders of the Government, with a view to ascertain the purest possible sources for the water-supply of the metropolis. The results of this inquiry, so far as they have transpired, appear to me so infinitely important in their relation to some of the questions just alluded to, that I think it expedient under the circumstances to wait for such new light as may accrue to our knowledge from the completion of these researches, before I touch the chemical division of the subject.

I have, &c. &c.

SECOND ANNUAL REPORT.

TO THE HON. THE COMMISSIONERS OF SEWERS OF THE CITY OF LONDON.

November 26th, 1850.

Gentlemen,

In obedience to that clause in your Act of Parliament under which my office is constituted, and which enjoins on your Officer of Health that he shall ‘report periodically upon the Sanitary condition of the City,’ I now submit to your Hon. Court my annual statement on this subject.

I. Mortality of the City of London.

During the fifty-two weeks, dated from September 30th, 1849, to September 28th, 1850, there died of the population under your charge 2752 persons. The rate of mortality, estimated from these data, for a population[30] of 125,500, would indicate somewhat less than twenty-two deaths (21·92) out of every thousand living persons.

[30] With the required correction for increase of population, the death-rate was probably about 21·25 per 1000.

Last year it was my painful duty to record the ravages of pestilence, then indeed hardly terminated, under the pressure of which our general death-rate had arisen to the alarming height of thirty in the thousand. On this present occasion, I have the happier task of laying before you the evidences of a mortality lessened considerably below its habitual average; and I rejoice in congratulating your Hon. Court on the testimony thus borne to the success of your sanitary exertions. For although, without question, some large share of this striking improvement may have depended on circumstances beyond our cognizance or control; although it may in part be but an instance of that tendency to periodical alternations of activity and repose which we recognise in disease, as in other operations of nature; although I should be over-sanguine if I believed, and premature if I stated, that your sanitary measures during the past twelve months had wrought such a change in the City as to ensure a continuance of this year’s comparative healthfulness; yet I may venture without hesitation to assure you, that the labours of the Commission have been fruitful of real and demonstrable advantage to the health of the people; that a sensible diminution has occurred in the physical causes of disease; and that, from various and disinterested sources, I hear grateful mention of improvements which you have effected.

In confirmation of this assurance, I may inform your Hon. Court that, in collecting my materials for the present statement, I solicited from the Union-Surgeons of the whole City of London certain particulars of information which they were peculiarly able to furnish; I inquired of them, namely, whether, during the past year, there had prevailed among the poorer classes in their several districts more or less than the ordinary pressure of epidemic, endemic, and infectious disease; and whether, in case of such difference having been observed, they could refer it, either for better or worse, to any changes recently wrought in the physical conditions of their respective neighbourhoods. They have had the kindness to furnish me with the information requested of them; and their replies testify with remarkable uniformity, both to the abatement of disease within their several provinces of practice, and to the considerable dependence of that improved condition of health on sanitary works effected under your auspices.

In order to form a correct estimate of the average mortality in any district, it is indispensable that one’s records should extend over many years. Thus only is it that fallacies can be avoided which arise from the alternate pressure and remittance of epidemic disease. The havoc effected by a periodical visitation of influenza, cholera, or plague, varies, in like manner as the ordinary death-rate varies, in different localities; and its variation contributes importantly to fix the healthiness or unhealthiness of such localities. But obviously, if we wish for practical purposes to calculate an annual rate of mortality, and to decide, in respect of any district, what are the chances of life for its population, we must distribute the peculiar mortality of the pestilence-period over those years which intervene between visitations of the pestilence.

Hitherto, in respect of the City of London, I have the record of only two years; two years differing from one another in the proportion of 30 to 22, and the mean mortality deduced from that biennial period would be 26 per thousand per annum.[31] I am, of course, unable to tell you with certainty whether that ratio be the true average death-rate of the City; but I incline to believe that an average calculated from a longer period, with less abrupt fluctuations, would give a lower figure as the accurate one.

[31] On account of corrections [already] adverted to, this mean death-rate should be reduced, probably to 25.2.

In future years, so long as I may have the honour of reporting to the Commission, I purpose proceeding, step by step, to the construction of a cyclical average from the materials which will constantly be increasing; and I trust that many years may elapse before any approach shall again be made to the high death-rate with which the cycle commenced.