This exception was so monstrous, that even the Corporation of the City of London took powers under their own Sewers’ Act for the preservation of the health of the people dwelling within the City boundary,—who number no more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand out of the two millions of us who are congregated in civic and suburban London. The remaining one million eight hundred thousand are left to be stifled or diseased at the good pleasure of Vested Interests. Indeed, it is ascertained that a quarter of a million of individuals absolutely _do_ die every year from the want of such a sanitary police as the Public Health Act, amended by some few additional powers, would establish. What number of persons are really sent out of the world from preventable causes. It is also true that those causes can be efficiently removed for about a halfpenny per head a week; or threepence per week per house; or about eight times less than those who die unnecessarily cost the public in hospitals, poor’s rates, and burial. In the “Journal of Public Health” for November, 1848, and August, 1849, it is shown by elaborate tables, that the direct cost of, and estimated money loss through, typhus fever alone in the metropolis, amounted during the four years, 1843–1847, to one million three hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds, or two hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred pounds annually. This sum is exclusive of the amounts contributed for the purchase and maintenance of fever hospitals. For 1848, when the mortality from typhus had increased to three thousand five hundred and sixty-nine, the direct cost and money loss was estimated at four hundred and forty thousand pounds. This cold-blooded way of putting the really appalling state of the case is, alas! the only successful mode of appealing to that hard-headed, though sometimes soft-hearted, periphrasis, John Bull, when he is under no special exciting cause of dread. His heart is only reached through his pocket, except when put in a state of alarm. Cry “Cholera!” or any other frightful conjuration, and he bestirs himself. To cholera we owe the few sanitary measures now in force; but which were passed by the House—as a coward may seem courageous—in its agonies of fright. The moment, however, Cholera bulletins ceased to be issued, John buttoned up his pockets tighter than ever, and Parliament was dumb regarding public health, except to undo one or two good things it had done. The inflated promises of the legislature collapsed into thin air, on the very day the danger was withdrawn. It was the legend over again of the nameless gentleman who, when he was sick, swore he would turn a monk; but when he got well “the devil a monk was he.” Ever since, sanitary legislation has been as much a dead letter in the Metropolis, as if the deadly condition of some of its districts had never been whispered between the wind and the nobility of Westminster, in Parliament assembled.