“Even statistics of actual disease consequent on overcrowding would not convey the whole truth as to the loss of health caused by it to the labouring classes….
“Nothing stronger could be said in describing the effect of overcrowding than that it is even more destructive to general health than conducive to the spread of epidemic and contagious diseases.”
And they pointed out that there was much legislation designed to meet these evils, yet that the existing laws were not put in force, some of them having remained a dead letter from the date when they first found place in the statute book.
And they investigated the causes of many of these things—and they assigned the blame for some of them—and they passed in review the conduct of the local governing authorities—and they recapitulated the existing laws upon these various matters, and suggested certain alterations, and made various valuable recommendations.
There was, in fact, placed on record a calm, unimpassioned, and unexaggerated statement of the evils which masses of the population of the great capital were enduring in the last quarter of the highly civilised and enlightened nineteenth century.
It was a thorough confirmation of all the reports of the Medical Officers of Health, and of the facts set out, and pressed by them, year after year, upon the attention of the Vestries and District Boards, and which had so persistently been ignored by so many of those authorities.
The Commissioners classified the—
“Unquestioned causes which produced the overcrowding and the generally lamentable condition of the homes of the labouring classes.”
The first was—