"Close beneath the feet of those who attend the services of their church there often lies an almost solid pile of decomposing human remains, heaped as high as the vaulting will permit, and generally but very partially coffined." The Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852 effected a great improvement in this respect by putting a term to the indefinite perpetuation of this horrible evil. It gave the Secretary of State power to prohibit further intramural burials, and it gave the "City," and other local authorities, the power to establish burial places beyond the boundaries of the metropolis. But, even when thus stopped, years had to elapse before the condition of intramural burial grounds and vaults would cease to vitiate the air around them.[41] The atmosphere of the "City," the air which people breathed, was thus vitiated in varying degrees of intensity by numerous and various abominations--the polluted Thames, defective sewerage and drainage, offensive trades, intramural interments. As regards the houses in which the people lived, these were crammed together--packed as closely together as builders' ingenuity could pack them--many of them combining every defect that houses could have, and so situated that ventilation was an impossibility. "In very many parts of the City you find a number of courts, probably with very narrow inlets, diverging from the open street in such close succession that their backs adjoin, with no intermediate space whatsoever. Consequently each row of houses has but a single row of windows facing the confined court, and thus there is no possibility of ventilation, either through the court generally or through the houses which compose it.... Houses so constructed as to be as perfectly a cul-de-sac out of the court as the court is a cul-de-sac out of the street."[42] And the climax of insanitary conditions was reached when these densely-packed houses were overcrowded by human beings. The process of converting dwelling-houses into warehouses, or business offices, or for trade or manufactures was in full swing--a constant force--and so the number of houses for people to live in became ever fewer. And the "tenement houses," in which the great bulk of the working classes lived, became more and more crowded; houses wherein "each holding or tenement, though very often consisting but of a single small room, receives its inmates without available restriction as to their sex or number, and without registration of the accommodation requisite for cleanliness, decency, and health." The Census of 1851 had shown an increase of over 4,200 in the population of the "City," and a diminution of nearly 900 houses. "Probably," wrote Dr. Simon, "for the most part it represents the continued influx of a poor population into localities undesirable for residence, and implies that habitations previously unwholesome by their overcrowdedness are now still more densely thronged by a squalid and sickly population....