The matter was a difficult one to deal with, as any severe restrictions might destroy the trade or manufacture and take away from the people the employment which gave them the means of earning a livelihood. Furthermore, such restrictions were usually resented as an infraction of personal liberty. Dr. Simon forcibly and conclusively answered this contention.
“It might,” he wrote, “be an infraction of personal liberty to interfere with a proprietor’s right to make offensive smells within the limits of his own tenement, and for his own separate inhalation, but surely it is a still greater infraction of personal liberty when the proprietor, entitled as he is to but the joint use of an atmosphere which is the common property of his neighbourhood, assumes what is equivalent to a sole possession of it, and claims the right of diffusing through it some nauseous effluvium which others, equally with himself, are thus obliged to inhale.”
Some improvement in this respect was rendered possible by the Act of 1851, which enacted that whatever trade or business might occasion noxious or offensive effluvia, or otherwise annoy the inhabitants of its neighbourhood, “shall” be required to employ the best known means for preventing or counteracting such annoyance.
But the remedy scarcely appears to have been availed of or enforced, and “greater London” was, as usual, excluded from the Act.
Another more constant pollution of the air was that resulting from intramural burial. “Overcrowding” in the “City” was not limited to the living; it extended even to the dead, and though the dead themselves had passed beyond any further possible harm from it, yet their overcrowding affected disastrously those they had left behind. Here the evils already described as existing in “greater London” existed also in acute form. Two thousand bodies or more were interred each year actually within the “City” area, and the burial grounds were densely packed. And “in all the larger parochial burying grounds, and in most others, the soil was saturated with animal matter undergoing slow decomposition.”
And the vaults beneath the churches were “in many instances similarly overloaded with materials of putrefaction, and the atmosphere which should have been kept pure and without admixture for the living, was hourly tainted with the fœtid emanations of the dead….”
In Dr. Simon’s words:—
“Close beneath the feet of those who attend the services of their church there often lies an almost solid pile of decomposing human remains, heaped as high as the vaulting will permit, and generally but very partially coffined.”
The Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852 effected a great improvement in this respect by putting a term to the indefinite perpetuation of this horrible evil. It gave the Secretary of State power to prohibit further intramural burials, and it gave the “City,” and other local authorities, the power to establish burial places beyond the boundaries of the metropolis. But, even when thus stopped, years had to elapse before the condition of intramural burial grounds and vaults would cease to vitiate the air around them.[41]