Recalling these incidents to the recollection of your Hon. Court, I would beg to observe that no similar endeavour can fully succeed, except as a system--well considered beforehand, and adjusted to the various circumstances which may require its application. Uncertainties of responsibility and conflicts of jurisdiction would inevitably occasion a sacrifice of life; and therefore, before the time when Cholera is likely to become epidemic, it should be definitively settled who is to undertake this organisation. Your Commission can have no jurisdiction in the matter; and the interference of the Corporation would be only at its own option. The legal responsibility rests solely with the Boards of Guardians: and it seems to me indispensable that, before the time for action arrives, the Corporation should determine its intentions; in order that the Boards of Guardians, if again called upon to organise arrangements of the kind in question, may know distinctly--either that the Corporation has relieved them of their task, or that there rests on them the undivided obligation of providing for the crisis. * * * * * III. Gentlemen, in concluding this report, I will not attempt to disguise from you that it has been written under feelings of considerable apprehension; and I am fully conscious that, in thus expressing myself, I am liable to the imputation of raising unnecessary alarm. If the possible mischief to be wrought by epidemic Cholera lay in some fixed inflexible fate, whatever opinion or knowledge I might hold on the subject of its return, silence would be better than speech; and I could gladly refrain from vexing the public ear by gloomy forebodings of an inevitable future. But from this supposition the case differs diametrically: and the people of England are not like timid cattle, capable, only when blindfold, of confronting danger. It belongs to their race--it belongs to their dignity of manhood, to take deliberate cognisance of their foes, and not lightly to cede the victory. A people that has fought the greatest battles--not of arms alone, but of genius and skilful toil, is little likely to be scared at the necessity of meeting large danger by appropriate devices of science. A people that has inaugurated railways--that has spanned the Menai Strait and reared the Crystal Palace, can hardly fear the enterprise of draining poison from its infected towns. A people that has freed its foreign slaves at twenty millions’ ransom, will never let its home population perish, for cheapness sake, in the ignominious ferment of their filth. Therefore, gentlemen, advisedly I state the danger as it seems to me. England has again become subject to a plague, the recurrence of which--or the duration--or the malignity, no human being can predict.