The next improvement which must speedily be pushed under John Bull’s very nose, is the removal of the nuisances which abound in crowded neighbourhoods from Land’s End to John o’Groats. The back-yards of houses in poor neighbourhoods are so many gardens, sown broadcast with the seeds of disease, and but too plentifully manured for abundant and continual crops. When rain falls on the surface of these parterres of poison, and is afterwards evaporated by the heat of the sun, there rises a malaria, intensified by decomposing refuse, which, inhaled into human lungs, engenders consumption, ending in the parish workhouse and death. It is a fact that the surfaces of some of the back-yards in London have been raised six feet by successive accumulations of vegetable and animal refuse. We must have no more such accumulations; offal of every kind must be removed daily by Act of Parliament. Ill-kept stables, which cause horses to become blind, and men to die of typhus, must be reformed; cow-feeding sheds, which produce diseased milk and offensive refuse, must be abolished, and milk supplied per railway from the country; disgusting and noxious manufactures, such as are carried on a few yards west of Lambeth Palace, on the river’s bank, must be removed to consort with knackers’ yards, in places remote from human habitations. The strong bar which John Bull opposes to such improvements is the dread of the Centralisation, which, he says, carrying them into effect would occasion. Local Government, he insists, is the great bulwark of the British Constitution. No bill is ever brought into Parliament for the good of the people,—that is well known,—but is passed for the sake of the places it creates, and the patronage it gives. Now, if we allow a practicable bill for the removal of these nuisances to pass, a swarm of commissioners, secretaries, clerks, inspectors, inquisitors, dustmen, and scavengers will be let loose upon the contented public, to supersede snug, comfortable, local boards, and to ruin innocent contractors. “Is,” John asks vehemently, “this to be borne?” and answers himself with equal emphasis, “Decidedly not. We prefer the nuisances.” But common sense steps in to reply, that as nuisances are a matter of taste, if every board could confine its own nuisances to its own parish so as not to take its neighbours by the nose, there would, perhaps, be no harm in letting it doze and wallow in its own filth as long as its taste would dictate. But as this is impossible, centralisation or no centralisation, Government, or somebody else, _must_ interfere to protect the extra-parochial lieges from destruction, by upsetting the Board and removing the rest of the nuisances.