And so the regulations were not made, or if made were not enforced. And, as the result, the great masses of the working classes, and the poorer classes in the metropolis, were by the deliberate decision of the great majority of Vestries and District Boards deprived of the protection which Parliament had devised and provided for their sanitary and physical well-being; and all the well-known evils of overcrowding were indefinitely perpetuated.
Apart from the sense of duty or responsibility to the people which ought to have appealed to them, there were other motives which might have done so.
The Medical Officer of Health for Paddington called attention to one of them in 1872. He wrote:—
“The costliness of preventable disease is enormous.
“(a) Sanitary supervision. (b) Removal to hospitals. (c) Disinfection. (d) Expenses in hospital. (e) Cost of burial. (f) Loss of work in wages. (g) Loss of life to the community. (h) Cost of widows and children.”
And the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel wrote in 1871:—
“… As the local rates are continually increasing for the relief of sickness and the support of widows and orphans, the building of asylums for the insane, and the providing of workhouse infirmaries for the debilitated and prematurely old, it is probable that local boards will direct more attention to the condition of the houses of the poor than they have hitherto done.”
The cost was brought home to them in 1871—“an exceptional year of mortality caused by the continued spread of smallpox.”
“It has been,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Lambeth, “one of the most alarming and expensive epidemics that have visited the country for a century. The cost in a pecuniary sense has been great, but it is nothing as compared to the cost of human life.