During the session of Parliament that has intervened between that Report and my present one, an event has occurred, which promises to remove effectually the evils on which I then addressed you. Her Majesty’s government, acting at the instigation of the General Board of Health, carried through Parliament a Bill, enacting that the Queen, by Order in Council, may prohibit further burials within any district of the metropolis, so soon (after the close of this year) as the General Board of Health should have provided the means of extramural interment. The operation of this Act of Parliament is such as, I have every reason to believe, you will welcome within the City of London: and I look forward to the complete cessation of burial within your territory, as a matter for warm congratulation among all who are interested in the cause of sanitary improvement.[58] [58] The Act of Parliament here referred to never passed into operation, and was repealed in 1852 by a second Metropolitan Burials Act, under which the City Commissioners of Sewers are at present acting as a Burial Board for the City of London. See the last Reports of this Volume, from page 280 to the end.--J. S., 1854. From the terms of the Act in question I find that Her Majesty’s Order in Council is to be preceded by a Report from the General Board of Health, stating their opinion of the expediency, that (in any particular case reported on) burial should forthwith be discontinued. Accordingly, in the present state of the law, it will devolve on that Board to initiate whatever measures may be necessary for the prohibition of further interment in the City. Two clauses of your Act of Parliament, which have hitherto been inoperative, may perhaps come into requisition whenever Her Majesty’s Order in Council closes the burial-grounds of the City; viz., clause 89, which empowers your Commission, if you shall “think fit, to provide fit and proper places, in which the poor, under proper rules and regulations, may be permitted to deposit the bodies of their dead previous to interment;” and the following clause, which authorises your Officer of Health, in case of necessity, and for protection of the living, to cause any dead body to be removed at your expense, to whatever building may have been provided for the reception of the dead, previous to interment. It may hardly be necessary that I should trouble you with any remarks on the subject of these clauses, till such time as they are likely to come into operation.