Sir John Simon has pointed out that it was not until the early part of the eighteenth century that hygiene in its modern significance loomed on the social horizon with clearer outline and more definite aims. A gradual transformation took place in the next hundred and fifty years, when the national records, as well as the reports of philanthropic organisations, indicate the gradual growth of a public opinion which presently sought its sanitary salvation in legislation. The nineteenth century saw, as a consequence, the accumulation of a huge mass of public health laws, designed to accomplish reforms where philanthropy or self-interest had failed to influence habits. The suggested designation, namely, the Legislative, is therefore peculiarly appropriate for this, the second stage of progress in the third period of our country's hygienic education. To legislation men pinned their faith as the most potent weapon of reform. From the first most inadequate and ineffective Factory Act of 1802 until the enactments of the last parliamentary session, each year has seen substantial additions made to the growing mass of sanitary legislation, which has become unwieldy in bulk and intensely complicated in machinery. Any attempt to enumerate even a few of the public health laws which crowd our statute books would here be tedious and out of place, though the community in general ought to be better acquainted than it is with its powers and obligations. For, truth to tell, fifty years of public health administration has proved that human beings are not yet consumed with a sufficiently strong desire for health and efficiency to be willing to change objectionable or unwholesome habits or to sacrifice their conception of comfort at the _suggestion_ of officials. Indeed the sterner measures of compulsory conformity were so necessary to the education of the public in the elements of healthy living, that the year 1866 saw the commencement of a new era in Public Health Department of the Government. "The grammar of common sanitary legislation,"[98] writes the historian of our "English Sanitary Institutions," "then first acquired the novel virtue of an imperative mood." "Must" was substituted in some laws for "may," and though the permissive has not, even in fifty years, entirely given place to the peremptory, the efforts to effect individual reform by Act of Parliament have, since the formation of the Local Government Board in 1872, assumed more importance and vigour.