It was farcical to amend the Standing Orders of Parliament, fixing twenty instead of fifteen as the minimum number of houses in any one parish which could be acquired by the Metropolitan Board without preparing a re-housing scheme, as if that would revolutionise the condition of the housing of the people of London, and yet something not far short of revolution was required if the housing of the people was to be reformed, and put on a proper sanitary basis. It is manifest that what was being dealt with by these Acts was only a fragment of the great housing question, and that such destruction of insanitary buildings as could possibly be effected by these means would amount to but a fraction of those unfit for human habitation in London, and would not touch the thousands of inhabited houses in every parish of London which were insanitary in varying degree, and dangerous to the individual and public health. It is clear, too, that if the insanitary conditions of the housing of the people were to be dealt with on a large scale, and with success, measures must be taken to secure the sanitary condition of the houses which such legislation did not touch. Otherwise general improvement was impossible, and existing conditions must continue indefinitely to flourish, and to produce their inevitable and enormous crop of deadly evil. How urgent was the need for reform in some parts of London may be gauged from the description of the condition of things in Bethnal Green in 1883, given by the Medical Officer of Health of the Parish:-- "The portions of the district I have examined include nearly 2,000 houses. "I have visited and carefully examined almost every one of these houses, and I must confess that a condition of things has been thereby revealed to me of which I had no previous conception, for I do not think I visited a single house without finding some grave sanitary defect; in a very large number the walls of the staircases, passages, and rooms are black with filth, the ceilings are rotten and bulging, the walls damp and decayed, the roofs defective, and the ventilation and lighting most imperfect. "The dampness of the walls is in some instances due to defects in the roof, but in many the moisture rises from the earth owing to the walls being constructed without any damp-proof course.... "In almost every house I visited I found the yard, paving, and surface drainage, in a more or less defective condition, a quantity of black foetid mud having accumulated in places." And all this was nearly thirty years after Bethnal Green had been endowed with a local sanitary authority.