"They appointed an examiner under the Adulteration of Foods Act (1860), and also under the Metropolitan Gas Act (1860), but the person appointed had no tools given him with which to perform the work entrusted to him. "Both the Acts are dead letters in the parish. As to the Metropolitan Gas Act, it conferred a large benefit, both as to purity and cost, on the metropolis, but the Vestries failed to carry out a single effective or important provision of that Act." In 1860, also, an Act had been passed empowering the local authorities in the metropolis to provide vehicles for carrying persons suffering from infectious diseases to hospital, and so obviating the danger to the public of such persons being conveyed in cabs or other public vehicles. That Act was also inoperative. The Vestries and District Boards, however, did perform a considerable amount of useful work. Local sewerage and drainage works were on the whole effectively dealt with. The rest of the work done was mostly of the routine order, such as scavenging and paving and lighting, though even that was not always done in the most sensible way, as exemplified in Paddington (1866). "The street sweepings of mud collected by the scavengers are stored in enormous quantities in the middle of the parish in a closely inhabited neighbourhood. Here it is allowed to decompose, &c. If it were intended to contrive an arrangement for developing malaria in the midst of a town population nothing could be better adapted for the purpose." A few of them had soared to the height of widening a street, or acquiring some small open space; in most, if not all, of these cases receiving financial help from the central authority. But as to the main causes of the prevailing insanitary evils, their aversion to active measures was constantly in evidence; equally so where the enforcement of the law would have entailed cost on the owners of insanitary houses. In some matters the plea of defects in the legislation might have been justifiably urged by them; in others they were often much hampered by the dilatory procedure attending proceedings for enforcing the sanitary provisions of the Metropolitan London Management Act. One of the Medical Officers of Health gives an illustration:-- "A very great nuisance was reported to us. We visited it, but had to wait a fortnight before the Vestry met in order to get leave to apply for a summons. The magistrate requires a week before hearing the case, and then he gives a week or two to do the work. So for a month or five weeks the nuisance may remain." The result was that infectious disease was given a long opportunity to spread itself unchecked through a whole district; an opportunity which it freely availed itself of.