Your Committee having viewed these places, will recollect that at No. 73, where the extreme width of the Shop and Slaughter-house was but 9 ft., there was no room to pass up and down the Slaughter-house when the carcasses of the slaughtered animals were hanging, excepting by moving sideways, and that the atmosphere of the place was pervaded by a hot, moist, sickening vapour, for want of thorough ventilation; you must also have remarked upon the general state of disrepair of the whole of these Slaughter-houses, the dilapidated roofs, the blood-stained and filthy state of the side walls, the uneven and broken condition of the flooring, the imperfect, totally inadequate, and badly placed water supply, the large accumulations of dung, offal, and blood, and the defective and sluggish drainage, down the gratings of which you could not fail to have seen a plentiful flow of crude liquid manure, which the man in charge was industriously sweeping into the sewers, to their great pollution; all these indicate a state of neglect which could only have arisen from a consciousness on the part of the owners and occupiers that the Legislature intended to abolish such places as private Slaughter-houses upon the expiration of the Act of 1844, 7th and 8th Vict., c. 84. Unfortunately, however, the so-called vested interests of the butchers proved too strong with the Government for the protection of the public, and Parliament in 1874, by the 37th and 38th Vict., c. 67, was induced to perpetuate these Slaughter-houses in the City of London, under such regulations it is your province to make and maintain. In order to be consistent, and to enable the Court of Sewers to exercise a proper amount of control, each Slaughter-house must be treated as a separate and independent building; and, in advising you as to the best mode of securing such control, it has ever been a source of deep anxiety and considerable embarrassment to me, how best to reconcile the wants of modern sanitation, decency, and order, with the inevitable sacrifices on the part of the occupiers of the smallest of these places, which I foresee and confess to be demanded by the institution of thorough disciplinary measures. The necessity for treating each Slaughter-house as a distinct structure “_per se_,” and the apparent consciousness of the inability of the holders of the smaller ones to adapt themselves to efficient regulations, is, I believe, the main cause of the opposition now made to the Bye-laws, for I have reason to know that the occupiers of the larger Slaughter-houses are ready to conform to the spirit of the Bye-laws, albeit they are not in accord with us as to some of the provisions therein.