Of great interest are the certified mortality statistics of phthisis in the British Army in the period 1830-46 and 1859-66 respectively; in the former it was 7·86 per 1,000, whilst in the latter period it had fallen to 3·1, this important difference being coincident with an increased cubic space per head in the barracks. Such facts as these, if only fully realised, should surely serve to stimulate municipal and other local authorities to provide decent and wholesome accommodation for the poor. It has been recently estimated that in London the total number of persons living in tenements of one to four rooms is 2,333,152, and of these nearly half a million live the life of the one-room tenement of three to a room and upwards. In the stirring words of Mr. John Burns, M.P.: "At least a million of people who live thus on wages that barely sustain decent life, are but prisoners of poverty, whose lot in life is but a funeral procession from the cradle to the grave ... for these, as soon as practicable, better homes should be provided at once in the interest of physique, of morals, of industrial efficiency, and municipal health." Yet, despite all these facts and the overwhelming evidence which has been collected on the dire results which follow in the wake of overcrowding and insanitary dwellings, we find a prominent magistrate in one of our great industrial cities publicly expressing himself as follows at a municipal banquet: "The Town Council sometimes attempted too much. For instance, they had been far too anxious to get quit of the slums. Now slums, in his opinion, were one of the necessities of all large towns, and it was impossible in the present state of civilisation to dispense with slums unless they could take the people living in them, who were not fit to live anywhere else, and drown them wholesale, as would have been done in the time of the French Revolution."