Of overcrowding or “pestilential heaping of human beings,” this matter of “infinite importance,” he wrote:—
“While it maintains physical filth that is indescribable, while it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, while it creates mortality enough to mask the results of all your sanitary progress, its moral consequences are too dreadful to be detailed.”
Pursuing his masterly analysis of the sanitary condition of the people in the “City” and its causes, he wrote:—
“Last and not least among the influences prejudicial to health in the City, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition of the working classes…. Often in discussion of sanitary subjects before your Honourable Court, the filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or destructive, or intemperate, or dishonest habits of these classes are cited as an explanation of the inefficiency of measures designed for their advantage. It is constantly urged that to bring improved domestic arrangements within the reach of such persons is a waste and a folly.
“It is unquestionable that in houses containing all the sanitary evils enumerated—undrained and waterless, and unventilated—there do dwell whole hordes of persons who struggle so little in self-defence against that which surrounds them that they may be considered almost indifferent to its existence, or almost acclimated to endure its continuance.
“It is too true that among the lower classes there are swarms of men and women who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle—swarms to whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived.
“My sphere of duty lies within the City boundary.
“I studiously refrain from instituting comparisons with other metropolitan localities.