"To my duty it alone belongs, in such respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this--a curtain which propriety may gladly leave unraised--you cannot but see that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while Society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence, and pauperism." And what was the physical result of this state of living? "In some spots in the City you would see houses, courts, and streets, where the habitual proportion of deaths is far beyond the heaviest pestilence rate known for any metropolitan district aggregately--localities where the habitual rate of death is more appalling than any such averages can enable you to conceive. "Among their dense population it is rare to see any other appearance than that of squalid sickness and misery, and the children who are reproduced with the fertility of a rabbit warren perish in early infancy. "The diseases of these localities are well marked. Scrofula more or less completely blights all that are born ... often prolonging itself as a hereditary curse in the misbegotten offspring of those who, under such unnatural conditions, attain to maturity and procreation. "Typhus prevails as a habitual pestilence. "The death rate during the last five years has been at the rate of about twenty-four per 1,000 per annum. "The City of London appears peculiarly fatal to infant life. "Of the 15,597 persons who died within your jurisdiction in the five years 1847-8 to 1852-3, nearly three-eighths died in the first five years of life." To his employers he mostly appeals. He hopes that the statements in his reports may suffice to convince them of the necessity which exists in the "City" of London for some effectual and permanent sanitary organisation. "For the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law such as you possess for your territory." He pointed out that-- "Inspection of the most constant, most searching, most intelligent, and most trustworthy kind is that in which the provisional management of our said affairs must essentially consist. * * * * * "The committee was given power by the Act for the amendment or removal of houses presenting aggravated structural faults. "Wherever your Medical Officer of Health may certify to you that any house or building is permanently unwholesome and unfit for human habitation, you are empowered to require of the owner (or in his neglect yourselves to undertake) the execution of whatever works may be requisite for rendering the house habitable with security to life." And he urged that:--