The subject of these remoter effects I refrain from pursuing, as foreign to my present purpose. That on which I wish to insist is the character of the river, in its relation to the marginal sub-districts which it habitually dampens and occasionally floods with putrescent soakage, and in its relation to the sewers of low gradient which it converts (often with their adjoining soil) into the similitude and hurtfulness of cesspools. I wish emphatically to point out, that the several parts of London have suffered, and are likely again to suffer, from Cholera, in proportion as either this malarious influence is exerted on them, or other kindred miasms are furnished by their soil. And it is my belief, from such evidence as is before me, that the general liability of London to suffer the epidemic visitation will cease, whenever an efficient and inodorous system of drainage, conveying all refuse of the metropolis beyond range of its atmosphere, shall be substituted for our present elaborate disguise of an unremoved nuisance. I deem it right to state this explicitly: not only because it is my duty to give you, in simple truth, the conclusions to which I am led by careful reflection on the facts; but likewise because--for the credit of sanitary medicine and for your justification in the awful presence of a recurrent pestilence within your jurisdiction--it ought to be thoroughly known how much of the cause is common to the entire metropolis, and has not admitted of removal by measures of partial improvement. And the circumstances will perhaps excuse me if I repeat to your Hon. Court--represented as you are both in the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers and in Parliament, where this question must shortly be discussed--that the universal reform of our metropolitan drainage, at whatever imaginable pecuniary cost, is an urgent claim and necessity, unless this great city is again, as two centuries ago, to live under the constant alarm of increasing epidemic destruction.