I reported to you that there were sanitary defects, inherent in certain large proportions of your municipal cure, which the most absolute control of drainage and water-supply would do nothing to amend,--constructional defects of houses and of courts, whereby their crowded inhabitants were excluded from a sufficiency of light and air, and were constrained, without remission or change, to breathe an atmosphere fetid with their own stagnant exhalations. I reported to you that, however unexceptionable might be the arrangement of such localities in matters already within your control--however clean their pavements, however pure their water, however effective their drainage, yet fever and the allied disorders could never be absent from their population; while under opposite arrangements, with nuisances around them, with organic poisons rising from the soil or mingling in the water, their mortality would rise to the horrors of pestilence, and might easily renew the most awful precedents in history. I described to you the class of miserable dwellings alluded to--‘Courts and alleys with low, dark, filthy, tenements, hemmed in on all sides by higher buildings, having no possibility of any current of air, and (worst of all) sometimes so constructed, back to back, as to forbid the advantage of double windows or back doors, and thus to render the house as perfect a _cul-de-sac_ out of the court, as the court is a _cul-de-sac_ out of the next thoroughfare:’ I affirmed that ‘this could never be otherwise than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose necessities allot them such residence;’ and assured you of the ‘incontrovertible fact, that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived subsistence, in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets.’ In habitations of this kind the death-rate would of necessity be high, even if the population were distributed thinly in the district. A single pair of persons, with their children, having such a court for their sole occupancy, would hardly be otherwise than unhealthy; the infants would die teething, or would live pallid and scrofulous; or a parent would perish prematurely--the father, perhaps, with typhus, the mother with puerperal fever. Judge then, gentlemen, how the mortality of such courts must swell your aggregate death-rate for the City, when I tell you that their population is in many instances so excessive, as, in itself, and by its mere density, to breed disease.