(_c_) And in twenty-five parishes or districts no regulations whatever had been made. In Hackney and Chelsea alone was any widespread use made of the regulation. The explanation usually put forward of the determination on the part of the Vestries not to enforce the sanitary laws as regarded houses was their regard for the financial interests of the ratepayers. But the real ground of their aversion was that action would put house-owners to expense. "Vested rights in filth and dirt" were strongly represented on the Vestries and District Boards. As a witness said before a Select Committee in 1882:-- "So long as vestrymen own little properties, and so long as their relations and friends do the same thing, and they are all mixed up in a friendly association, you can never get the prevention of the continuance of unhealthy tenements carried through."[143] And not only was there a passive but often an active opposition to work being performed which it was their duty to do. A general inspection would have shown what houses ought to have been made subject to such regulations, but it would also have exposed too publicly the iniquities of house-owners, and would have entailed a heavy expense on those who left the houses in a perpetual state of dilapidation, insanitation, and filth; and so the staff of inspectors was kept as low as possible. A thorough enforcement of the regulations would have necessitated a supervision of their houses by the owners in addition to expense. Many straws showed which way the wind blew. Thus the Medical Officer of Health for Bethnal Green wrote:-- "It is by the constant inspection and reinspection of property inhabited by careless and destructive tenants that most good can be done. I recently felt it my duty to recommend a house-to-house inspection of the whole parish--a procedure urgently required to ascertain the condition of the drainage and water supply arrangements. I regret to say this recommendation was not acted upon." And the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, in referring to house-to-house inspection, wrote:-- "This most important branch of all sanitary work has received as much attention as the number of the sanitary staff will admit." And so the regulations were not made, or if made were not enforced. And, as the result, the great masses of the working classes, and the poorer classes in the metropolis, were by the deliberate decision of the great majority of Vestries and District Boards deprived of the protection which Parliament had devised and provided for their sanitary and physical well-being; and all the well-known evils of overcrowding were indefinitely perpetuated. Apart from the sense of duty or responsibility to the people which ought to have appealed to them, there were other motives which might have done so. The Medical Officer of Health for Paddington called attention to one of them in 1872. He wrote:-- "The costliness of preventable disease is enormous.