And indeed, gentlemen, the mere pecuniary import of life thus squandered is not inconsiderable. The costs of medical attendance on these superfluities of disease are heavy items of parochial expenditure: and although much of the undue mortality is of children, and consists in the premature extinction of life that hitherto has no market value--costing only the tears that are shed for it; yet there likewise occur among your preventable deaths, very many cases in which adult life is sacrificed, with all its strength and utility; and where, besides the wasted capital which that loss implies, there often remains for the district which has poisoned the man an entailment of orphanage and widowhood. Nor, again, can it be questioned, that year by year, as general education advances, the sanitary condition of a district will be an important element in determining the value of its property. In engaging houses, men will not only look to rent, and to rates on rent; they will look also to rates on life, and will doubt the cheapness of a town residence, however small in rental, where their lease of life must be shortened from its intended duration, and form part of an average mortality two-thirds higher than in the suburbs. It is an instinct in this direction, or perhaps the guidance of knowledge, that within late years has given so much extension to suburban residence, and has carried numbers of the wealthier inhabitants of the City to dwell so far from their places of daily business: and the same instinct or knowledge yearly acts more towards the less affluent classes, urging them to fly as far as possible beyond the smoke and crowding and unwholesome vapours of the metropolis. I entertain great hope and little doubt, that, within a few years, the working classes will have organised for themselves extensive means of suburban residence; that vast barracks of model-houses, rising on healthier soil and amid purer atmosphere, will receive hundreds of thousands of inmates from those classes of society which now throng the courts and alleys of the metropolis; and that by this spontaneous emigration, in so far as it may affect the City, great assistance will be given to those endeavours which will be made, under authority of your Act, to thin the court population of the City, and to diminish the too dense array of houses inhabited by the poor. As I look to the poor-rates of the City of London, as well as to the other circumstances just adverted to, I feel the deepest conviction that _property_, no less than _life_, is interested in the progress of sanitary reform: and once again, most earnestly, I beg leave to congratulate your Hon. Court on the acquisition of powers, conferring on you the inestimable privilege of doing so much good for those whom you represent, and for the often unrepresented poor; of relieving so much suffering; of prolonging so much life.