Those most important measures marked the end of one great period in the sanitary history of this great metropolis. Of that period it is to be said that there is none in the history of London in which less regard was shown for the condition of the great mass of the inhabitants of the metropolis; no period when the spirit of commercialism recked so little of the physical condition and circumstances of those upon whom, after all, it depended; no period when the rights of property were so untrammelled by any consideration for the welfare of human flesh and blood; no period when private individuals not alone so strained, for their own advantage or aggrandisement, the utmost rights the law allowed them, but far exceeded those rights, and too often successfully filched from the public that to which the law gave them no right. Never had there been a time in which the rights of property had been more insisted upon and exercised. Never a time in which land-owners, house-owners, and builders did as freely as they liked with their own, regardless of the injury or damage inflicted upon others; nor in which manufacturers carried on, without interference, trades for their own benefit, which were not merely offensive, but actually death-dealing to their neighbours. And throughout this period the people in their daily lives and circumstances were absolutely unprotected by any public authority, or by any local governing body. There was no one to help them to contend against the extremest exercise of real or even assumed rights. In this period London, the metropolis, had grown up, and had not merely been permitted by the Government and the Legislature to grow up practically without government, guidance, supervision, or restraint, but it had been absolutely denied any system of local government, and so been denied all provision for the sanitary needs of the community. In 1835 a large and liberal measure of municipal self-government was given to all the cities and towns and municipalities large and small of England and Wales--many of them not a tithe so populous as the great parishes of London--and a governing body, elected by the ratepayers, and with almost all the essential powers of local government, was instituted in each. But the Municipal Corporations Act expressly excluded the great towns which surrounded the walls of the "City" and which constituted the metropolis, and the law continued to recognise them only as rural parishes.