"Clerkenwell does not stand alone: from various parts of London the same complaints are heard of insanitary property being owned by members of the Vestries and District Boards, and of sanitary inspection being inefficiently done, because many of the persons whose duty it is to see that a better state of things should exist, are those who are interested in keeping things as they are." And in another part of their report they wrote:-- "It is evident that the remedies which legislation has provided for sanitary evils have been imperfectly applied in the metropolis, and that this failure has been due to negligence in many cases of the existing local authorities." The part of the evidence which was of greatest value and interest was that which laid bare the responsibility for the dreadful conditions under which such masses of the people lived. Apart from the measure of responsibility which fell on Parliament itself, and it was no light one, it is clear that those conditions were due (1) in part to the various classes of "owners," (2) in part to the people themselves, and (3) in part to the local authorities. As regarded _owners_, there were first the ground landlords, who themselves, or whose predecessors had leased their land for building purposes, or with houses thereon to a tenant. It would appear clear that these ground landlords or freeholders, or lessors, had power to enforce against the person who held directly from them the repairing clauses of leases. But the existing condition of things showed that they did not do so. One of the witnesses, giving evidence about a particular property, said:-- "By the terms of even the old leases the tenant was supposed to keep the place in proper repair.... The property has gradually deteriorated in consequence of neglect." And Lord Salisbury, who asked:-- "I suppose it is practically impossible for the ground landlord to see that the conditions are kept?" Was told in reply:-- "The only way in which it is possible for him to do that is to keep a very active supervision over his property. "If that was done by ground landlords, and had always been done by them, you would have personal supervision carried out by a sufficient number of people to ensure the conditions being kept." Any idea of property having its duties as well as its rights appears to have been non-existent. Next to the land-owner was the numerous and varied class of house "owners," from the man who leased the land from the landlord and built the house, or who had leased the house and had sub-leased it to some one else. And often there were sub-lessees, until in some cases there was a chain of persons holding different interests in the same house. And there was the class of persons who take a house and break it up into tenement-rooms, and who were known as "house-knackers," or house jobbers, or house farmers, or as "middlemen," these last being defined as any one who stands between the freeholder and the one who occupies.