"Those districts are composed almost entirely of small courts, very small and very narrow, the access to them being only under gateways; in many cases they have been larger courts originally, and afterwards built in again with houses back to back, without any outlet behind, and only consisting of two rooms, and almost a ladder for a staircase; and those houses are occupied by an immense number of inhabitants; they are all as dark as possible, and as filthy as it is possible for any place to be, arising from want of air and light." Here is another description--that of "Christopher Court," a cul-de-sac in Whitechapel--given, in 1848, by Dr. Allison, one of the surgeons of the Union:-- "This was one of the dirtiest places which human beings ever visited--the horrible stench which polluted the place seemed to be closed in hermetically among the people; not a breath of fresh air reached them--all was abominable." It is needless to multiply instances. There is a dreadful unanimity of testimony from all parts of London as to the miserable character and condition of the houses in which in the middle of the nineteenth century the industrial and the lower classes were forced to live; the deficiency or total absence of drainage, the universal filth and abomination of every kind, the fearful overcrowding, the ravages of every type of disease, and the absolute misery in which masses struggled for existence. The density of houses upon an area has long been recognised as one of the great contributing causes to the ill-health of a community, but when coupled with the overcrowding of human beings in those houses, the combined results are always disastrous in the extreme. Overcrowding had been a long-standing evil in London; had existed far back in history. As London had grown, the evil had grown; and about the middle of the last century it was immeasurably greater than ever before, and its disastrous consequences were on a vastly larger scale. The great economic forces which resulted, in certain districts of London, in the destruction of houses and great clearances of ground, had largely reduced the available accommodation for dwellings, and the expelled inhabitants, chained to the locality by the fact of their livelihood being dependent upon their residence being close by, were forced to invade the yet remaining places in the neighbourhood suited to their means. As the circle of possible habitations contracted, while the numbers seeking accommodation therein increased, a larger population was crowded into an ever-diminishing number of houses. It was also a most unfortunate but apparently inevitable consequence that once a beginning was made to improve some of the streets and thoroughfares of London, and to substitute in any district a better class of houses and shops for those actually existing, the improvements necessarily involved increased overcrowding in that particular locality and in those adjoining it. But so it was.