"Your Committee are of opinion that the existing law, which requires that the improvement scheme shall provide for the accommodation of, _at the least, as many persons_ of the working class as may be displaced, may be relaxed, and that the accommodation to be required should vary from half to two-thirds." As a matter of fact very few, if any, of the families thus dispossessed returned for the purpose of occupying the new buildings. Indeed one witness[154] said that-- "Neither the Peabody Trustees, nor--more or less--the other Artizans' Dwellings Companies would take in the class of people who had been displaced." The Committee called attention to the importance of favouring in every way facilities of transit between the metropolis and its suburbs by an extension of cheap workmen's trains. And they also recommended that-- "All existing sanitary legislation should be more fully enforced, especially in those parts of the suburbs where buildings are so rapidly springing up." A Bill was at once introduced into Parliament, the object of which was to lay down such rules for estimating the value of the premises to be purchased as would prevent the owners of insanitary property obtaining an undue price for it--"the intention of Parliament being that the owner should not gain by having allowed his property to fall into an insanitary state." It was passed, and as an Act it further empowered the Secretary of State, under certain circumstances, to dispense with the obligation of re-housing the people to a greater extent than one-half of those displaced. Into the detailed intricacies of many of these Housing Acts it is really useless to enter; and the enumeration of the details tends to obscure the broad and essential features of the whole subject. In the effort of the "owners" to repudiate the responsibility for their or their predecessors' infamous neglect, and to shift the blame for the appalling state of affairs on the middlemen and the occupiers; in the effort of the middlemen to evade their responsibilities by availing themselves of every obstructive device the law so lavishly placed at their disposal, and of both of them to extort the utmost amount of money they could for their disease-begetting, death-distributing property; the unfortunate occupiers were the immediate sufferers and victims, and a huge wrong and injury was inflicted upon the community. It was mere tinkering with the subject to pass an Act removing some petty technical difficulties for putting some previous and very limited Act in force, and to diminish the expense and delay in carrying out the Act.