That much improvement remains to be accomplished within your province, is a certainty which I have endeavoured here, as on former occasions, plainly to set before you. But I cannot close my Report without adverting to the fact, that both within and around the City, there are sanitary evils for which you are not responsible--evils beyond your control--powerful causes of diseases in hourly operation; and that these are so extensive in their agency, as to neutralise much of the good which it lies in your competence to effect. The mere fact, that for the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law, such as you possess for your territory, is an evil to you. When, at the commencement of next year, you will be proceeding to suppress the several nuisances against which you are armed; when the various trades of the City will have ceased to send forth smoke or stink, you can raise no barrier against invasions from around; southward, you cannot exclude the unwholesome airs wafted from the river and from across it; nor on either side, east or west, the soot that showers down from innumerable shafts encircling you; nor northward, the odours that rise from the shambles of Clerkenwell. And likewise within the City there will be remaining--out of your control, unremedied evils, the existence of which has long been denounced, and the removal long expected. In 1849, with the cholera amidst us, great exertions were made, and greater promises. In that dreadful week, when two thousand victims of our metropolitan population fell beneath its poison; when every household, from hour to hour, trembled at the visible nearness of death; the public were scared out of indifference. If the visitation could have been bought away, at the expense of doubling all local rates in perpetuity, no doubt the sacrifice would have been made. Public opinion was kindled to overwhelm all opposition. The metropolis was to be drained afresh; the outfall of sewerage was no longer to be beneath our windows; the river was to be embanked; its rising tide was no longer to make our sewers disgorge their poisonous contents into our streets and houses; dead bodies in their decay, were no more to desecrate the breathing-space of the living; water was no longer to be supplied--clumsily, insufficiently, and unwholesomely, at the discretion of private capitalists: all was to be amended. For participation in these advantages, the City had to look beyond its own representatives, and to await the more comprehensive measures of Her Majesty’s Government. Two years have elapsed, and none of the measures referred to has made visible progress. The water question remains unsettled; arrangements for extramural interment of the dead have been disconcerted at what seemed the moment of their completion; the river still receives the entire sewage of this immense metropolis, and still at each retreating tide, spreads amid the town, as heretofore, its many miles of fetid, malarious mud.