To provide an inoffensive outfall for the sewerage of our vast population; to render the river a source of unqualified advantage; to give wide extension and sounder principles to the system of water-supply; to suppress all trades and occupations which taint the atmosphere with materials of organic decomposition; to abate the nuisance of smoke; to provide the facilities for extramural interment, and to procure the prohibition of all further burial amidst our living; to improve the domestic arrangements of the poor, and to insure for them an adequate supervision; to establish public baths and laundries, which may offer the utmost facilities and inducement for the maintenance of personal cleanliness; to hinder the occupation of houses which breed pestilence; to destroy such as are irremediably hostile to health, and to disperse the stifled population of courts and alleys; to substitute for such slums as we hope to depopulate and destroy, but in open streets and with perfect ventilation, houses and lodgings, which not only shall offer to the labouring classes every convenience essential to health and decency and comfort, but shall likewise serve as models of household economy for the whole district in which they stand;--these, Gentlemen, are the aims, briefly recapitulated, for the sake of which I have been obliged, as it were casually in my Report, to touch on many subjects perhaps foreign to your jurisdiction, but lying at least on the confines of your province, and remaining with you now either to retain or to transfer.[29] [29] Perhaps, to make these passages intelligible, the reader should be apprised that the business of the Corporation is considered in a great variety of Committees, which thus have their several and particular provinces. Of the many matters adverted to, as foreign to the ordinary functions of the Commission of Sewers, some might belong to the _City-Lands_ Committee, some to the _Improvement_, some to the _Finance_, some to the _Navigation_, some to the _Markets_ Committee, and so on. Obviously it would have been out of my place to touch on these details of jurisdiction; and I therefore urged only the essentially _municipal_ character of the several improvements I advocated.--J. S., 1854. * * * * * That the subject of sanitary improvement in its widest scope, and with all that even incidentally relates to it, is one which, according to the ancient constitution of the City, rightfully belongs to the authorities of the Corporation, in some one or other of their municipal relations--that it belongs to them equally as their privilege and their duty, cannot for a moment be questioned. And if your Hon. Court should determine on a negative opinion as regards yourselves, and should decide on transferring these matters to the Common Council, I venture to hope that your influence may accompany them in their course, and may procure for them the consideration they deserve.