This order—in addition to its wholesome influence on the second class of lodging-houses, would apply beneficially to the third class; and, in further relation to the latter, there would probably be required various minor regulations with respect to facilities for washing, lighting, ventilation and the like, which admit of being fixed in detail, only as each particular case comes under your notice, with its deficiencies recorded in the schedule of its registration.
11. In addition to this power of regulating lodging-houses, a further authority has been conceded you by the Legislature, for the amendment or removal of houses presenting aggravated structural faults. Wherever your Officer of Health may certify to you that any house or building is permanently unwholesome and unfit for human habitation, you are empowered to require of the owner (or, in his neglect, yourselves to undertake) the execution of whatever works may be requisite for rendering the house habitable with security to life.
Finally,—under your former Act you were authorised, and indeed required, to appoint Inspectors of Nuisances, whose duties were to consist in the following particulars:—They were to superintend and enforce the due execution of all duties to be performed by the scavengers; to report to your Commission all breaches of your rules and regulations; to point out the existence of nuisances; to record whatever complaints might arise in relation to the supply of water, or in relation to any infraction, either of the Act, or of any of the regulations made by you under its authority for the preservation of order and cleanliness and for the suppression of nuisances.
Hitherto your Hon. Court has deemed it sufficient compliance with the terms of the Act, to engraft the functions above described on the office of your previously appointed Inspectors of Pavements; and these Officers have endeavoured very diligently to fulfil the multifarious obligations thus imposed on them. During the past year it has become obvious to me that this arrangement of their duties is inconvenient, and that the occupation of their time as Inspectors of Pavements prevents them devoting the requisite number of hours to the other important duties.
I need hardly add, for the information of your Hon. Court, that the immense increase of sanitary business implied in your new Act (an increase probably equivalent to doubling or trebling the former amount) renders a continuance of the former arrangement still less possible than heretofore; the important functions assigned to your Inspectors of Nuisances will now require to be discharged, under the superintendence of your Officer of Health, with uninterrupted assiduity and vigilance; and I would therefore take the liberty of begging your Hon. Court to refer this subject to the consideration of your Committee, together with some other points relative to the administration of your new powers.[73]
[73] Two additional Inspectors came into work, under appointment of the Commission, at Christmas, 1853. See [last Annual Report].—J. S., 1854.
Here, gentlemen, terminates my statement of the powers now vested in you for the maintenance of the public health. Authority so complete for this noble purpose has never before been delegated to any municipal body in the country. In exercising the means of such wide beneficence, your Hon. Court will be discharging duties of immeasurable importance to the public welfare; and those who have the honour and responsibility of giving you professional advice will have a task of more than ordinary difficulty.
It is easy to foresee the numerous obstacles which interested persons will set before you to delay the accomplishment of your great task. Sometimes technical objections will be raised to your proceedings: sometimes vexatious delays and evasions will occur in the fulfilment of your injunctions.
When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable property—of some property which is a constant source of nuisance, or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging, he shall not give fever as the equivalent;—amid these proceedings, you will be reminded of the ‘rights of property,’ and of ‘an Englishman’s inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.’