"The temptation is very great to overcrowd; the poor family, however large, by crowding into one room, and by even taking a casual lodger in addition, obtains a sort of home at a cheaper rate, and the owner gets a much larger revenue out of what I must, I suppose, call human habitations. The resulting illness and death are considered inevitable, or are viewed with a stolid indifference." 1858. _3rd Quarter:_-- Of the greatness of the mass of prevalent evils he wrote: "I have often reported it here, but the very enormity of the evil blunts our appreciation of it...." There had been a high mortality in the Quarter. "We are once more, I believe, the worst parish in London...." "The back districts of this parish require relief, as much as Ireland ever did, from a class of middlemen who, with some few most honourable exceptions, grind out all they can from the most squalid districts, and carry nothing back in the way of cleanliness or improvement." He gives a long list of streets and courts and places where disease was rampant and deadly owing to the insanitary conditions. "It may perhaps be said that all this is in the order of nature, and cannot be prevented. My experience of a quarter of a century among these diseases points quite the other way. Providence does not intend that reservoirs of stinking putrid matter shall stand so close to the poor man's door as to infest him at bed and board.... In the Jewish scriptures the places for the purposes here mentioned are ordered to be without the camp, as far from the breathing and eating places as possible; and among us, as you see, when we tolerate such abominations, He visits us with death. It is the result of the irrevocable laws of nature often averted by what appear as happy accidents, but at last, when disregarded, deadly. Gentlemen, you are the trustees for life and death to a population of well-nigh 30,000 people, who from the force of circumstances are more or less unable to help themselves...." "Of course it cannot be expected that we can provide the homes of the poor with the orderly arrangements and benefits of these Institutions (Dispensaries, &c.)--that, however, will form no excuse here or hereafter for not carrying out the improvements we can easily achieve, and which a wise legislature has given us full authority to do." "Total deaths in Quarter ended October 2nd, 1858--369, of which 225 were of children under 5 years = 61 per cent!!" The whole tone of this report was such that he could not possibly continue as Medical Officer of Health to a then existing Vestry, and he resigned. He was succeeded by another very able man, Dr. Henry Bateson, from whose reports may be continued the description of this parish up to the census of 1861. "The onward moral and intellectual progress of the human race depends far more upon the sanitary state which surrounds it than has ever yet entered into our imaginations to conceive....