There was, in fact, placed on record a calm, unimpassioned, and unexaggerated statement of the evils which masses of the population of the great capital were enduring in the last quarter of the highly civilised and enlightened nineteenth century. It was a thorough confirmation of all the reports of the Medical Officers of Health, and of the facts set out, and pressed by them, year after year, upon the attention of the Vestries and District Boards, and which had so persistently been ignored by so many of those authorities. The Commissioners classified the-- "Unquestioned causes which produced the overcrowding and the generally lamentable condition of the homes of the labouring classes." The first was-- "The poverty of the inhabitants of the poorest quarters, or in other words the relation borne by the wages they received to the rent they had to pay." The next was the demolition, for various reasons, of houses inhabited by the working classes and poorer people, and the consequent displacement of the people. The third was the relation between the owners of property upon which the dwellings of the poor stood, and the tenants of those dwellings. "The other great remaining cause of the evil was the remissness of local authorities." From their very origin, these "authorities" were unsatisfactory instruments for the performance of the public duties. "But little interest was, as a rule, taken in the election of vestrymen by the inhabitants," instances having been known of vestrymen in populous parishes being returned by two votes, on a show of hands. Elsewhere it is reported they elected each other. The Commissioners referred to the "supineness" of many of these metropolitan local authorities in sanitary matters, and to the "laxity of administration of some of them." And still worse, to the self-interested action of vestrymen. Thus on the Vestry of Clerkenwell, they said, were-- "Thirteen or fourteen persons who are interested in bad or doubtful property, including several 'middlemen'; and ten publicans who, with the exception of one or two, had the reputation of working with the party who trade in insanitary property; and accordingly this party commands a working majority on the Vestry." "It is not surprising to find that the Sanitary Inspectors whose tenure of office and salary is subject to such a body should show indisposition to activity." "The state of the homes of the working classes in Clerkenwell, the overcrowding, and other evils, which act and react on one another, must be attributed in a large measure to the default of the responsible local authority."