No city, so far as Science may be trusted, can deserve immunity from epidemic disease, except by making absolute cleanliness the first law of its existence; such cleanliness, I mean, as consists in the perfect adaptation of drainage, water-supply, scavenage, and ventilation, to the purposes they should respectively fulfil; such cleanliness, as consists in carrying away by these means, inoffensively, all refuse materials of life—gaseous, solid, or fluid, from the person, the house, the factory, or the thoroughfare, so soon as possible after their formation, and with as near an approach, as their several natures allow, to one continuous current of removal.

To realise for London this conception of how a city should cleanse itself may involve, no doubt, the perfection of numberless details. Yet, most of all, it would pre-suppose a comprehensive organisation of plan and method: not alone for that intramural unity of system which is needful for all the works, as most for those of drainage and water-supply; but, equally, to harmonise these works with other extramural arrangements for utilising to the country the boundless wealth of metropolitan refuse—for distributing to the uses of agriculture what is then rescued from the character of filth—for requiting to the fields in gifts for vegetation, what they have rendered to the town in food for man.

How far the construction of London has proceeded on the recognition of such objects, or how far the advantages of such a plan have been realised, it could only be a mockery to ask. Our metropolis, by successive accretions, has covered mile after mile of land. Each new addition has been made with scarcely more reference to the legitimate necessities of life, than if it had clustered there by crystallisation. With no scientific forecast to plan the whole, with little but chance and cheapness to shape the parts, our desultory architecture has eclipsed the conditions of health. Draining up-hill or down-hill, as the case might be, and running their aqueducts at random from chalk-quarries or river-mud; or ponding sewage in their cellars, and digging beside it for water; blocking-up the inlets of freshness and, equally, the outlets of nuisance; constructing sewers to struggle with the Thames—now to pollute its ebb, now to be obstructed by its flow; the builders of many generations have accumulated sanitary errors in so intricate a system, that their apprehension and their cure seem equally remote.

Therefore—by reason of causes, ramified through the whole metropolis and deep-rooted in its soil, which bind all parts together in one common endurance of their effects—therefore cannot epidemic disease be conquered by any exertions or by any amelioration, short of the complete and comprehensive cure. Against the danger we dread, no shelter is to be found in petty reforms and patchwork legislation. Not to inspectorships of nuisances, but to the large mind of State-Policy, one must look for a real emancipation from this threatening plague.

A child’s intellect can appreciate the wild absurdity of seeking at Peru what here runs to waste beneath our pavements,—of ripening only epidemic disease with what might augment the food of the people—of waiting, like our ancestors, to expiate the neglected divinity of water in some bitter purgation by fire.

But it needs the grasp of political mastership, not uninformed by Science, to convert to practical application these obvious elements of knowledge; to recognise a national object irrelevant to the interests of party; to lift an universal requirement from the sphere of professional jealousies, and to found in immutable principles the sanitary legislation of a people.

I have the honour to remain,
&c. &c.

APPENDIX OF TABLES
ILLUSTRATING THE
SANITARY CONDITION OF THE CITY OF LONDON.

[I.]Area and Population of the several Districts and Sub-districts of the City.
[II.]Quinquennial Synopsis of City Mortality, from Michaelmas 1848 to Michaelmas 1853; with Death-Rates calculated for this period, on the Population enumerated in 1851, for each District and Sub-District of the City.
[III.]First annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks dating from October 1st, 1848, to September 29th, 1849.
[IV.]Second annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 30th, 1840, to September 28th, 1850.
[V.]Third annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 29th, 1850, to September 27th, 1851.
[VI.]Fourth annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 28th, 1851, to September 25th, 1852.
[VII.]Fifth annual enumeration of Deaths, relating to the fifty-two weeks, dating from September 26th, 1852, to September 24th, 1853.
[VIII.]Quinquennial Mortality, classified by Age; first, for the entire City; next, for the Three Unions severally.
[IX.]Number of Deaths occasioned, during the last five years, by certain Acute Diseases, chiefly epidemic, infectious, and endemic.
[X.]Comparative Mortality in different seasons of the year: namely, in the Autumn-Quarters (October, November, December), in the Winter-Quarters (January, February, March), in the Spring-Quarters (April, May, June), and in the Summer-Quarters (July, August, September), of the five years from Michaelmas 1848 to Michaelmas 1853.
[XI.]Autumn Mortality.
[XII.]Winter Mortality.
[XIII.]Spring Mortality.
[XIV.]Summer Mortality.