“Few people believe we are so bad as we really are, and if we do not believe we shall not of course try to mend it, but it cannot be denied.
“The rich Londoners pay a low poor-rate. The poor Londoners pay a high poor-rate. This bears hardly upon us; it stifles us: more and more packed, more and more impoverished; with very little space between the poor ratepayer and the pauper, there is more sickness and death.
“Density of population brings you more deaths, more sickness, more expense.
“The dreadfully vitiated air of our courts and close rooms produces and fosters consumption.”
Commenting on the common lodging-houses, he wrote:—
“The police regulations for order, cleanliness, and prevention of disease are in the highest degree satisfactory…. The benefits are so great that the employment of the same regulations in the more crowded and filthier houses of the poor can only be a question of time. It is the highest humanity to quicken the progress.
“Vestries have power sufficient for the purpose. The need is so great, so undoubted by those who have seen the evils with their own eyes, and the benefit to be obtained so certain, that if the local authorities do not enforce the improvements, the police will have to do it.
“As to the overcrowding, I have brought many cases before you, each from illness resulting in difficulty of cure, constantly recurring. ‘I can never get out of that house,’ said the district surgeon of one of them. The eight rooms in this house were always full, the receipts £2 2s. a week, yet it was dirty, neglected, and overcrowded. So the poor live, and I may say, so they die.”
“As to some manufactories, some of them are very bad, and their pernicious influence spreads widely. I do not think any manufacturer should be obliged to leave; trades must, of course, be protected; but one man must not, to save a little expense in his building and machinery, be allowed to poison a neighbourhood, containing as this does some 30,000 people.
“There are various ways of making almost all of them bearable.”