When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable property--of some property which is a constant source of nuisance, or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging, he shall not give fever as the equivalent;--amid these proceedings, you will be reminded of the ‘rights of property,’ and of ‘an Englishman’s inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.’ Permit me, gentlemen, to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these principles, and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will oftenest be made to them, are exactly those which are most completely condemned by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With private affairs you interfere, only when they become of public import; with private liberty, only when it becomes a public encroachment. The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken clouds of smoke, the melting-house that nauseates an entire parish, the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous disease--these surely are not private, but public affairs. And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each such nuisance, as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke, the stink, the fever, that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling, intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the duration of his life. And for the rights of property--they are not only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property; and your Act asserts its rights. The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains, that to reduce the numbers of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish his rental: in the spirit of your Act, it is held a sufficient reply, that human life is at stake, and that a landlord, in his dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor, cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial habits, or let to them for hire, at however moderate a rent, the certain occasions of suffering and death.