Reports Relating to the Sanitary Condition of the City of London

by John Simon

Permit me, gentlemen, to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these principles, and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will oftenest be made to them, are exactly those which are most completely condemned by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With private affairs you interfere, only when they become of public import; with private liberty, only when it becomes a public encroachment. The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken clouds of smoke, the melting-house that nauseates an entire parish, the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous disease—these surely are not private, but public affairs. And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each such nuisance, as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke, the stink, the fever, that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling, intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the duration of his life. And for the rights of property—they are not only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property; and your Act asserts its rights. The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains, that to reduce the numbers of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish his rental: in the spirit of your Act, it is held a sufficient reply, that human life is at stake, and that a landlord, in his dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor, cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial habits, or let to them for hire, at however moderate a rent, the certain occasions of suffering and death.

And indeed, gentlemen, the mere pecuniary import of life thus squandered is not inconsiderable. The costs of medical attendance on these superfluities of disease are heavy items of parochial expenditure: and although much of the undue mortality is of children, and consists in the premature extinction of life that hitherto has no market value—costing only the tears that are shed for it; yet there likewise occur among your preventable deaths, very many cases in which adult life is sacrificed, with all its strength and utility; and where, besides the wasted capital which that loss implies, there often remains for the district which has poisoned the man an entailment of orphanage and widowhood.

Nor, again, can it be questioned, that year by year, as general education advances, the sanitary condition of a district will be an important element in determining the value of its property. In engaging houses, men will not only look to rent, and to rates on rent; they will look also to rates on life, and will doubt the cheapness of a town residence, however small in rental, where their lease of life must be shortened from its intended duration, and form part of an average mortality two-thirds higher than in the suburbs. It is an instinct in this direction, or perhaps the guidance of knowledge, that within late years has given so much extension to suburban residence, and has carried numbers of the wealthier inhabitants of the City to dwell so far from their places of daily business: and the same instinct or knowledge yearly acts more towards the less affluent classes, urging them to fly as far as possible beyond the smoke and crowding and unwholesome vapours of the metropolis. I entertain great hope and little doubt, that, within a few years, the working classes will have organised for themselves extensive means of suburban residence; that vast barracks of model-houses, rising on healthier soil and amid purer atmosphere, will receive hundreds of thousands of inmates from those classes of society which now throng the courts and alleys of the metropolis; and that by this spontaneous emigration, in so far as it may affect the City, great assistance will be given to those endeavours which will be made, under authority of your Act, to thin the court population of the City, and to diminish the too dense array of houses inhabited by the poor.

As I look to the poor-rates of the City of London, as well as to the other circumstances just adverted to, I feel the deepest conviction that property, no less than life, is interested in the progress of sanitary reform: and once again, most earnestly, I beg leave to congratulate your Hon. Court on the acquisition of powers, conferring on you the inestimable privilege of doing so much good for those whom you represent, and for the often unrepresented poor; of relieving so much suffering; of prolonging so much life.

That much improvement remains to be accomplished within your province, is a certainty which I have endeavoured here, as on former occasions, plainly to set before you.

But I cannot close my Report without adverting to the fact, that both within and around the City, there are sanitary evils for which you are not responsible—evils beyond your control—powerful causes of diseases in hourly operation; and that these are so extensive in their agency, as to neutralise much of the good which it lies in your competence to effect.

The mere fact, that for the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law, such as you possess for your territory, is an evil to you. When, at the commencement of next year, you will be proceeding to suppress the several nuisances against which you are armed; when the various trades of the City will have ceased to send forth smoke or stink, you can raise no barrier against invasions from around; southward, you cannot exclude the unwholesome airs wafted from the river and from across it; nor on either side, east or west, the soot that showers down from innumerable shafts encircling you; nor northward, the odours that rise from the shambles of Clerkenwell.

And likewise within the City there will be remaining—out of your control, unremedied evils, the existence of which has long been denounced, and the removal long expected.

In 1849, with the cholera amidst us, great exertions were made, and greater promises. In that dreadful week, when two thousand victims of our metropolitan population fell beneath its poison; when every household, from hour to hour, trembled at the visible nearness of death; the public were scared out of indifference. If the visitation could have been bought away, at the expense of doubling all local rates in perpetuity, no doubt the sacrifice would have been made. Public opinion was kindled to overwhelm all opposition.

The metropolis was to be drained afresh; the outfall of sewerage was no longer to be beneath our windows; the river was to be embanked; its rising tide was no longer to make our sewers disgorge their poisonous contents into our streets and houses; dead bodies in their decay, were no more to desecrate the breathing-space of the living; water was no longer to be supplied—clumsily, insufficiently, and unwholesomely, at the discretion of private capitalists: all was to be amended.