It includes the principal measures from time to time passed by the Legislature to create local governing authorities in sanitary matters—the various measures designed and enacted to improve the condition of the people—and the administration of those measures by the local authorities charged with their administration.
It is a narrative, in fact, of the sanitary—and, therefore, to a great extent of the social—evolution of this great city.
It is doubtful how long a time would have elapsed before the condition of the people came into real prominence had it not been for the oft-recurring invasions of the country by epidemic disease of the most dreaded and fatal forms. Ever-present diseases, disastrous and devastating though they were, did not strike the imagination or appeal to the fears of the public as did the sudden onslaught of an awe-inspiring disease such as cholera.
An epidemic of that dreaded disease swept over London in 1832, and there were over 10,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths in the districts then considered as metropolitan—the population of those districts being close upon 1,500,000.
For the moment, the dread of it stimulated the people, and such governing authorities as there were, to inspection, and cleansings, and purifications, and to plans for vigorous sanitary reform; but the instant the cholera departed the good resolutions died down, and the plans disappeared likewise.
There were, however, some persons upon whom this visitation made more abiding impression; and they, struck by the waste of human life, by the frequent recurrence of epidemics which swept away thousands upon thousands of victims, and distressed by the perpetual prevalence and even more deadly destructiveness of various other diseases among the people, bethought themselves of investigating the actual existing facts, and the causes of them—so far at least as London, their own city, was concerned.
And then slowly the curtain began to be raised on the appalling drama of human life in London, and dimly to be revealed the circumstances in which the great masses of the working and labouring classes of the great metropolis lived, moved, and came to the inevitable end, and the conditions and surroundings of their existence.
The slowness with which England as a nation awoke to the idea that the public health was a matter of any concern whatever is most strange and remarkable. It seems now so obvious a fact that one marvels that it did not at all times secure for itself recognition and acknowledgment. But men and women were growing up amidst the existing surroundings, foul and unwholesome though those were, and some, at least, were visibly living to old age; population was increasing at an unprecedented rate; wealth was multiplying and accumulating; the nation was reaching greater heights of power and fame. What, then, was there, what could there be wrong with the existing state of affairs?
Real social evils, however, sooner or later, force themselves into prominence. For long they may be ignored, or treated with indifference by the governing classes; for long they may be endured by the victims in suffering and silence; but ultimately they compel recognition, and have to be investigated and grappled with, and, if possible, remedied.