All through the earlier half of the nineteenth century, in fact, London, the great metropolis, was left to evolve itself so far as regarded the public health and sanitary condition of the people.
The tremendous import of such deliberate inaction by Parliament, and by successive Governments, is even now only partly comprehended. But the nemesis has been truly a terrible one. The injury wrought was in many ways irreparable, and we are still reaping the crop of evil sown by such seed—are still far from the end of the appalling consequences such a disastrous policy has entailed.
CHAPTER II
1855–1860
The Act “for the better Local Management of the Metropolis”[54] which was passed by Parliament in 1855 was the turning point in the sanitary history and evolution of London.
It put a term to the chaos of local government in “greater London” and swept away the three hundred trumpery and petty existing local governing bodies. It created a legally recognisable metropolis by defining its component parts and boundaries. It established a definite system of local representative government in that metropolis for the administration of its local affairs. It conferred upon the new authorities not only the powers vaguely possessed and imperfectly, if at all, acted on by their predecessors, but a considerable number of new ones. It laid the basis of an organisation for the sanitary supervision of the inhabitants of each parish of greater London.
And with the object of making provision for the effective treatment of some of the numerous matters affecting London as a whole—matters of a general and not of a local character—with which smaller local authorities could not possibly deal, and with the further object of securing a certain uniformity of administration by the new local authorities, it founded a central governing body for the metropolis.