Under circumstances like those just adverted to, may be found traces of enactment against _offensive and injurious trades_. Unregulated slaughtering throughout all London, except the City, tallow-melting in St. Paul’s church-yard, bone-boiling beside Lambeth Palace, may serve to illustrate the completeness and efficiency of these laws--even in our metropolitan area. Here we greatly lack some competent authority, on the part of the Government, to investigate all circumstances connected with such establishments, generally; to suggest laws for their prospective restriction, as to places wherein they may lawfully settle; and to frame regulations--enforceable by any Local Board of Health, for ensuring that all available measures be employed to mitigate their nuisance. Considering the circumstances under which many of these establishments have existed, no one can entertain a thought, that--even for the public health, they should be liable to the tyranny of an unconditional displacement. But if there existed--as undoubtedly there should exist, some skilled tribunal, competent to speak on the subject; then, I will venture to say, it might be quite in accordance with our English sense of liberty, that--after a certain condemnatory verdict by this tribunal, it should be open to the Local Board of Health to procure their expulsion, on payment of whatever compensation an ordinary jury might award. Again, with _factories_; thanks to Lord Shaftesbury’s indefatigable benevolence, the law has appointed an inspection of certain establishments, a restriction of their hours of labour, and some care against the dangers of unboxed machinery. And with mining also the law has interfered, chiefly as to the ventilation of mines; but hitherto so ineffectively that, while I write, the coal-miners are remonstrating with the Legislature on the thousand lives _per annum_ still sacrificed through the insufficient protection accorded them. If there be meaning in this legislation--if it imply any principle, the meaning and the principle require to be developed into a general law, that every establishment employing labour be liable to inspection and regulation in regard of whatever acts and conditions are detrimental or hazardous to life. If factory-children are cared for, lest they be over-worked; and miners, lest they be stifled; so, for those who labour with copper, mercury, arsenic, and lead, let us care, lest they be poisoned! for grinders, lest their lungs be fretted into consumption! for match-makers, lest their jaws be rotted from them by phosphorus! And here let it again be noticed, as in the class of cases last spoken of, how greatly wanted is some skilled tribunal, to form part of any lawful machinery which might ensure that, in these and similar instances, no precautions necessary to life are withheld through ignorance or parsimony.