The houses which he devoted to this purpose, solely for his own profit, were placed under the control and inspection of the police, and had to be registered as "Common Lodging Houses." Overcrowding in them was checked by restricting the number of inmates who might be in each room; regulations (confirmed by a Secretary of State) were made, and steadily enforced, for the separation of the sexes; for the proper cleansing of the houses; and for compelling the keeper to give immediate notice of fever or any contagious or infectious disease occurring therein. The accumulation of refuse was to be prevented, and provision had to be made for adequate sanitary accommodation, for better drainage, and for sufficient water supply. A very brief experience showed that great practical benefits resulted from thus regulating these houses, and the amount of sickness and mortality in them became astonishingly small, considering the character of their inmates and the localities where they were situated; and inasmuch as the number of such houses was nearly 5,000, and the population in them about 80,000, the benefit was a really substantial one. How obstinate and pertinacious was the opposition of house-owners, or middlemen, to regulation and supervision of any kind is illustrated by a case reported by the Assistant Police Commissioner.[45] The owner of certain premises in St. Giles' had been often applied to, without success, to remedy some gross sanitary defects therein which had resulted in the loss of life by fever. Brought to bay at last, at the Police Court, and ordered to remedy the evil, he said that he was willing to do all in his power to abate the nuisance ... but, "he thought he ought not to be dictated to as to the way his property was to be managed." His words embodied the predominant spirit of the time. "There are," wrote the Assistant Police Commissioner in commenting upon this case, "owners of property whom nothing but the strong arm of the law can move." Unfortunately the Act did not go far enough. Single rooms occupied by families did not come within its scope. They constituted an enormous proportion of the habitations of the people, and they were allowed to continue the prolific cause of sanitary evils and of physical and moral degradation. Limited in its scope though the Act was, it afforded nevertheless one great object lesson--the lesson which since that time has been consistently preached by all who had actual experience as regarded the sanitary condition of the people of London--the lesson that the worst of the sanitary and social evils could only be effectually grappled with, on the one side by the supervision and regulation and constant inspection of the houses in which the poorer classes lived, and upon the other side by insistent compulsion of house-owners to maintain a certain standard of sanitation and cleanliness in those houses.