"Any room or place whatever (not a factory or bakehouse) in which any handicraft is carried on by any child, young person, or woman, and to which the person employing them had a right of access and control." No child under 8 was to be employed, and none between 8 and 13 was to be employed more than six and a half hours a day--and sundry other directions. The workshops, moreover, were to be kept in a proper sanitary state, and the administration of the sanitary provisions of the Act was placed in the hands of the local authorities--the Home Office Inspectors having concurrent jurisdiction. These Acts had a two-fold effect in the direction of sanitary evolution: the improvement of the sanitary conditions under which the people worked, and the prohibition of work entailing consequences detrimental to the physical well-being of the workers. Their effect would have been of the greatest value in London had they been vigorously enforced. Some of the Medical Officers of Health endeavoured to enforce the Act. Thus the Medical Officer of Health for the Strand reported to his employers (1868-9):-- "During the past year the provisions of the Workshops Regulation Act, 1867, have, so far as practicable, been enforced." And the Medical Officer of Health for St. George, Hanover Square, wrote (1870-1):-- "I have endeavoured to carry out the Workshops Act by the abatement of overcrowding, by enforcing due ventilation, and closing at the legal time, so as to prevent the scandal and suffering of dressmakers still being compelled to toil for 16 hours." But the silence of others on the subject told its own tale and pointed its own moral. Active inspection was essential for success, but inspection was not encouraged by the Vestries or District Boards, and the intentions of the Legislature were once more frustrated by the failure of the local authorities to do their duty. After four years Parliament took the duty away from their incapable hands and transferred it to the Factory Department of the Home Office. One other Act of importance Parliament also passed about this time, "The Artizans' and Labourers' Dwellings Act, 1868." Sanitary legislation has as yet done little more for old property, and the whole of Central London was old property, than to improve the drainage, and occasionally to cleanse or whitewash some small fraction of it; and there remained the fact that numerous districts or conglomerations of houses were unreformable, and when the most was done to them that could be done under the law were still unfit for human habitation. In the previous year a Bill had been introduced into Parliament by Mr. Torrens:--