"Your Committee," they wrote, "would pause, from the sad statements they have been obliged to make, to observe that it is painful to contemplate in the midst of what appears an opulent, spirited, and flourishing community, such a vast multitude of our poorer fellow-subjects, the instruments by whose hands these riches were created, condemned for no fault of their own to the evils so justly complained of, and placed in situations where it is almost impracticable for them to preserve health or decency of deportment, or to keep themselves and their children from moral and physical contamination. To require them to be clean, sober, cheerful, contented under such circumstances would be a vain and unreasonable expectation. There is no building Act to enforce the dwellings of these workmen being properly constructed; no drainage Act to enforce their being properly drained; no general or local regulation to enforce the commonest provisions for cleanliness and comfort." Lurid as were the details thus made public of the condition in which the vast masses of the people in London were living, neither Parliament nor the Government took any action beyond ordering successive inquiries by Poor Law Commissioners, or Committees of the House of Commons, or Royal Commissions. Before one of these Commissions[3] the following striking evidence was given--evidence which it might reasonably be expected would have moved any Government to immediate action:-- "Every day's experience convinces me," deposed the witness,[4] "that a very large proportion of these evils is capable of being removed; that if proper attention were paid to sanitary measures, the mortality of these districts would be most materially diminished, perhaps in some places one-third, and in others even a half. * * * * * "The poorer classes in these neglected localities and dwellings are exposed to causes of disease and death which are peculiar to them; the operation of these peculiar causes is steady, unceasing, sure; and the result is the same as if twenty or thirty thousand of these people were annually taken out of their wretched dwellings and put to death--the actual fact being that they are allowed to remain in them and die. I am now speaking of what silently but surely takes place every year in the metropolis alone." But the Government took no action--beyond a Building Act which did little as regarded the housing of the people. No local bodies took action, and years were to pass before either Government or Parliament stirred in the matter. In dealing historically with matters relating to London as a whole, it is to be remembered that for a long time there had been practically two Londons--that defined and described as the "City," and the rest of London--that which had no recognised boundaries, no vestige of corporate existence, and which can best be described by the word "metropolis."