"Lastly, and applying to all these--multiplicity of local authorities, and the want of sufficient powers in such authorities to deal with these evils." "Great as these evils are in London," he wrote, "... there is not one among them that cannot be remedied if proper steps be taken. "The first and most obvious necessity in the metropolis is to sweep away the existing chaos of local jurisdiction." Included in that chaos were two Boards with great powers of taxation over which the ratepayers had no control.[53] One of them consisted of the persons appointed under the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844, who, at a cost of £24,000 a year, entirely neglected their work. The other, the Commissioners of Sewers, who had demonstrated their utter incapacity, the cost of whose establishment was "something extraordinary," and who in the five years of their existence had only attempted one great work--"the Victoria Sewer"--which cost a large sum, and which not many years after fell to ruins. The great epidemic of cholera, its attendant panic, its gruesome accompaniments, its revelation of the actual condition of the masses, and of the rottenness of the local authorities, and the growing outcry against the iniquity of such a state of things in a civilised and Christian country, brought matters to a head. The state of the Thames had also become a greater danger than ever to the community, and a more unbearable nuisance. As described by _The Lancet_ in July, 1855:-- "The waters are swollen with the feculence of the myriads of living beings that dwell upon the banks, and with the waste of every manufacture that is too foul for utilisation. Wheresoever we go, whatsoever we eat or drink within the circle of London, we find tainted with the Thames.... No one having eyes, nose, or taste, can look upon the Thames and not be convinced that its waters are, year by year, and day by day, getting fouler and more pestilential.... The abominations, the corruptions we pour into the Thames, are not, as some falsely say, carried away into the sea. The sea rejects the loathsome tribute, and heaves it back again with every flow. Here, in the heart of the doomed city, it accumulates and destroys." And the Government, compelled at last by the force of events to take some steps for the better sanitary government of the metropolis, and for remedying some of the evils the people suffered under, decided on taking action. Acknowledging the necessity for giving local government to "greater London"--the "City" of course already had its own--it proposed the creation of a central authority which should deal with certain matters affecting London as a whole, and local authorities which should deal with local affairs affecting their own localities. And, in 1855, a group of measures giving effect to these views, and containing also what amounted to a sanitary code similar to that in the Public Health Act already for years in force in England, was passed by Parliament.