Charles Dickens said:—
“The object of the resolution he was proposing was to bring the Metropolis within the provisions of the Public Health Act, most absurdly and monstrously excluded from its operation…. Infancy was made stunted, ugly, and full of pain; maturity made old; and old age imbecile.
“He knew of many places in London unsurpassed in the accumulated horrors of their long neglect by the dirtiest old spots in the dirtiest old towns under the worst old governments in Europe.
“The principal objectors to the improvements proposed were divided into two classes.
“The first consisted of the owners of small tenements, men who pushed themselves to the front of Boards of Guardians and parish Vestries, and were clamorous about the rating of their property; the other class was composed of gentlemen, more independent and less selfish, who had a weak leaning towards self-government. The first class generally proceeded upon the supposition that the compulsory improvement of their property when exceedingly defective would be very expensive….
“No one,” he went on to say, “who had any knowledge of the poor could fail to be deeply affected by their patience and their sympathy with one another—by the beautiful alacrity with which they helped each other in toil, in the day of suffering, in the hour of death.
“It hardly ever happened that any case of extreme protracted destitution found its way into the public prints without our reading at the same time of some ragged Samaritan sharing his last loaf or spending his last penny to relieve the poor miserable in the room upstairs or in the cellar underground. It was to develop in the poor people the virtue which nothing could eradicate, to raise them in the social scale as they should be raised, to lift them from a condition into which they did not allow their beast to sink, … to cleanse the foul air for the passage of Christianity and education throughout the land, that the meeting was assembled. The object of their assembly was simply to help to set that right which was wrong before God and before man.”
The realisation of this object, noble as it was, was not easily attainable.
The Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields said that “the difficulty of legislation in these matters was to hit the medium between the rights of property and the rights of humanity.” He might have added, with truth, that the difficulty had so far been met by sacrificing the rights of humanity to the rights of property.
Lord Ashley had pointed out that they “had to contend with ignorance, indifference, selfishness, and interest;” or as Lord Robert Grosvenor more vigorously expressed it, in a phrase which should live in history as giving the key to the mystery of the slow sanitary evolution of this great city, they had to contend against “vested interests in filth and dirt.”