The whole of the transactions, so far, resulted in a net loss to the Metropolitan Board, or in other words, a net charge upon the ratepayers of London of over £1,100,000. As Mr. Chamberlain described the result, in an article he contributed to the _Fortnightly Review_ of December, 1883:-- "Torrens' and Cross' Housing Acts are tainted and paralysed by the incurable timidity with which Parliament ... is accustomed to deal with the sacred rights of property.... "The individual wrong-doer is to remain unpunished--retribution for his sins is to be exacted from the whole community." The enormous cost of carrying the Acts into effect stayed the hand of the Metropolitan Board, while the length of time, stretching out into years, required for the various proceedings, militated against the success of the schemes so far as providing residences for the displaced people. An example of the working of the Act was described in 1883 by the Rev. S. A. Barnett.[152] "In 1876 the dwellings of 4,000 persons in this parish (Whitechapel) were condemned as uninhabitable, and the official scheme for their demolition and reconstruction was prepared. During the next four years the 'scheme' ploughed its course through arbitration and compensation with a puzzling slowness. "It was indeed a 'killing slowness,' for, during all those years, landlords whose claims had been settled spent nothing on further repairs; tenants, expecting their compensation, put up with any wretchedness; while the Vestry, looking to the approaching reconstruction of the houses, let streets and footways fall to pieces. It was not until 1880 that the needful demolition was seriously begun. Since that date the houses of some thousands of the poor have been destroyed." And then he described the slowness of the reconstruction, and added:-- "Such is the seven years' history of the Artizans' Dwellings Act in a parish under the rule of the Metropolitan Board of Works." He expressed his opinion that the prime source of the evil was not in the law, but in the local administration; but the complications of ownership, the endless legal difficulties and formalities, the numerous arbitrations, necessarily consumed years of time before the land could be cleared for building, and then the actual building of the new houses was by no means rapid. The mode of procedure was attended with such difficulties and disadvantages, and the administration of the Acts so clogged, that a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed and sat in 1881, and again in 1882, to inquire into the causes of the want of success, and to consider in what way the law might be further amended so as to make it really workable. The condition imposed as to re-housing, and which was so rigorously insisted on, did not by any means achieve the desired result.