“The state and condition of the dwellings of the poorer classes are a stain upon our civilisation.”
“… No one can conceive, nor would they believe, unless eye-witnesses, the wretched circumstances in which vast numbers of families have to spend their lives. It is indescribable.”
“The daily task of keeping clean their houses and families, once a pleasure to them as well as a duty, having to be performed amid overwhelming obstacles on every side, from which no hope of escape remains to cheer them on, is gradually neglected and ultimately abandoned, their spirits become torpid and depressed, and this is necessarily followed by the derangement of the functions of the body. Finally they become reckless, and this recklessness increases the evil which gave it birth. There is action and reaction. What marvel then that, like unto those about them, they float down the ebb tide towards the dead sea of physical dirt and moral degradation. It has been truly said by Dr. Southwood Smith, ‘The wretchedness being greater than humanity can bear, annihilates the mental feelings, the faculty distinctive of the human being.’”
“The heedlessness shown in the building of houses is astonishing. No care is taken about the nature of the subsoil, the position, the ventilation, and means of cleanliness. They are run up anywhere and almost anyhow, and too often become the prolific source of disease.” And he quotes: “No man has a right to erect a nuisance, and the public has clearly as good a right, as great an interest in enforcing cleanliness to prevent the outbreak of an epidemic as in requiring walls to prevent the spread of fire. Yet, where one is destroyed by fire, how many thousands are there destroyed by disease, the indirect result of such erections?”
“We are desperately careless about our health, and apparently esteem it of small value. A great modern writer has truly said: ‘The first wealth is health. No labour, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters.’”
The descriptions here given enable us to realise how terrible and pitiable a state of things had been reached, and the depths of filth, and misery, and abomination into which the people had been allowed to sink through the indifference of Parliament, the absence of any local government, and the neglect or avarice of the “owners.”
One hope there now was. Parliament had at last made laws to remedy these evils, and local governing authorities had been created to administer and enforce the laws.
In 1858 a Public Health Act was passed by Parliament, which put an end to the existence of the Board of Health, and transferred to the Privy Council the administration of the Diseases Prevention Act. And the Privy Council was authorised to cause inquiry to be made in relation to matters concerning the public health. In 1861 a medical department of the Privy Council was formed which has in many ways been of immense service to the cause of public health, and which, as time went on, developed towards a true Ministry of Public Health.
All things considered, by the end of the first five years of the working of the new local constitution conferred upon the metropolis, a real beginning had been made in the sanitary evolution of the great city. Some of the grossest evils had been attacked, and a start made in lifting London out of the depths of the appalling slough of abominable filth in which it had become submerged.
In some of the vitally important matters progress was material. The improvement in the water supply was considerable, the main drainage works had been started; the construction of many new sewers, the abolition of great numbers of cesspools, and the better drainage of houses, were all events of a decidedly satisfactory character.