The number of inhabited houses in the "City" was hundreds short of 15,000. In the metropolis it was over 300,000. The "City" was 720 acres in extent: what in 1855 was regarded as the metropolis was about 75,000 acres in extent. And here, with no visible boundary of separation between them, were what were still "Parishes," but what were in reality great towns; not merely merged or rapidly merging into each other, but already merged into one great metropolis. Some of them even had a greater population than the "City" itself. St. Pancras, for instance, with 167,000 persons; St. Marylebone with 157,000, and Lambeth with 139,000. Of that greater London--or, in effect, of London itself--there is a complicated and tangled story to tell. Long before the middle of the nineteenth century had been reached, the time had passed when the "City" could contain the trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and business, which had grown up. They had overflowed into London outside the walls, and just as in the "City" the great economic forces produced certain definite changes in the circumstances and sanitary condition of the people living therein, so, in the greater London, the commercial spirit radiating gradually outwards, produced precisely similar results, only on a far wider scale, and with more potent effect. Trade, and commerce, and wealth, and population, were increasing by leaps and bounds; and like the rings which year by year are added to the trunk of a tree, so year by year, decade by decade, London--the metropolis--spread out, and grew, and grew. From something under one million of inhabitants in 1801, the population increased to nearly two and a half millions in 1851, partly by natural increase, due to the number of those who were born being greater than of those who died, partly by immigration from the country. This was London, in the large sense of the title--London, the great metropolis which had never received recognition by the law as one great entity, and whose boundaries had never been fixed, either by enactment, charter, or custom.[5] Dependent as is the public health, or sanitary and social condition of the people, upon the circumstances in which they find themselves placed, and the economic forces which are constantly at work moulding those circumstances, it is in as great a degree dependent on the system of local government in existence at the time, upon the scope and efficacy of the laws entrusted to the local authorities to administer, and upon the administration of those laws by those authorities. As for local government--unlike the "City"--this greater London was without form and almost void. With the exception of the Poor Law Authority--the Boards of Guardians--whose sphere of duty was distinctly limited, there was, outside the boundaries of the "City," not even the framework of a system of such government; and the confusion and chaos became ever greater as years went on and London grew.