The effect of the order made in 1879 by the Privy Council, as to dairies, cowsheds, and milkshops, had been very beneficial, and a marked change for the better in the conditions under which the milk trade was conducted was the result. That Order was revoked in 1885 by the Privy Council, and a new one passed extending the powers of local authorities in the matter, and prescribing further precautions to secure the sanitary condition of all dairies and cowsheds, and for the protection of milk against infection or contamination.
Another beneficial sanitary improvement was effected in 1883, by the extension of the benefits of the infectious hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board.
The Royal Commission on Fever and Smallpox Hospitals, in 1882, stated that in their opinion it was of paramount importance that the hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, to which so many classes of persons might become liable to be removed, should be made as little unattractive as the nature of the case admitted, and they considered that the pauper character which attached to the hospitals of the Board, and which rendered them repulsive to all but the indigent, would disappear if the distinction between paupers and non-paupers were abolished.
This suggestion was partially given effect to by the Diseases Prevention (Metropolis) Act of 1883, which enacted that, subject to certain arrangements, the admission of any person suffering from infectious disease into any hospital provided by the Metropolitan Asylums Board, or the maintenance of any such person therein, should not be considered to be parochial relief.
The plan was only partly successful, but as years went on the hospitals were increasingly used by persons other than those of the legally recognised pauper class.
In the years 1884 and 1885 the hospitals demonstrated their great utility. There was a severe epidemic of smallpox. From its outbreak in 1884, to its subsidence in the autumn of 1885, no less a number than 12,425 patients passed through the hospitals, hospital ships, and camps of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and the arrangements for the removal to hospital of cases of infectious disease, from the whole of the metropolis, worked smoothly and satisfactorily.
The gain to the community in thus removing infectious cases from its midst was immeasurable.[165]
In 1885 the Report of the Royal Commission which had been inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes was published. It presented to the general public a mass of facts of which previously they had taken but little heed, and the vast importance of which they had utterly failed to realise; and it brought into the forefront of social questions the vital question of the public health, and the imperative necessity of remedying evils which were eating into the very vitals of the community.
The Royal Commissioners depicted the widely prevalent and dreadful overcrowding which existed, and which in certain localities was becoming more serious than ever, and they gave numerous instances of it. They described the fearsome condition of tenement-houses, and of the people living therein—the inadequacy of the water supply—the defective sanitary accommodation in houses—the lack of air space—the absence of ventilation—the use of cellars and underground rooms as dwelling-places—the limitless filth.
And they pointed out the dreadful results of this condition of things—physical, moral, and material—the prevalence of disease, the heavy death-rate, the destruction of bodily health, the dreadful immorality resulting from overcrowding, the degradation to which masses were doomed, the incitement to drink, and depravity, and crime. They declared that:—