The whole sanitary administration--so far as any existed in London--was in a state of chaos, and the various local authorities were able, with absolute impunity to themselves, to ignore and even defy the General Board of Health. Of these authorities, as has been already said, there was a multiplicity, and it was no infrequent occurrence to find the administrative authority of some of them in the hands of parties directly interested in the continuance of the existing state of matters, evil though those were. In fact, the "vested interests in filth and dirt" were a power in local administration in "greater London," and the practical result was that the great majority of the population of the metropolis were left without any protection against the ravages of epidemic or other preventable diseases. The indifference of Parliament, moreover, had left London without any effective or systematic sanitary supervision; and in no part of it, except the "City," was there any officer conversant with the effect of local influences on the health of the population, or who could advise as to the sanitary measures which should be adopted. The Board of Health having had it brought home to them that, with their limited powers, they were unable to introduce order into this chaos, or to enforce even the most elementary precautions against the spread of the disease, their President addressed a letter on the 29th of January, 1855, to Lord Palmerston, the then Home Secretary (and a few weeks later the Prime Minister), in which he set forth the exact state of affairs as ascertained by his own observation and by the experience of some of the best and most well-informed medical men in London. In this letter he summarised the main causes of the insanitary condition in which the people of London were forced to live. He wrote:-- "The evidence on the localising conditions of cholera given in the report of Dr. Sutherland points to the following as among the more prominent of the removable causes of zymotic disease. "Open ditches as sewers. Want of sewers. Badly constructed sewers accumulating deposits and generating sewer gases. "The pollution of the atmosphere in streets and within houses from untrapped drains, from sewer ventilating openings in streets, and from cesspools, whereby the air was contaminated and the sub-soil saturated with filth. "Want of house drainage. "The absence of any organised daily system of cleansing, and the consequent retention of house refuse in or near dwellings. "Bad water, badly distributed. Unwholesome trades. Unwholesome vapours exhaled from the Thames. Cellar habitations. "Neighbourhoods, the houses of which are closely packed together with narrow overcrowded streets, alleys and courts so constructed as to prevent ventilation. Houses structurally defective, filthy, unventilated, and overcrowded--absolutely unfit for human habitation." And several others which need not be here enumerated.