"To pave streets, and to water roads, to drain houses or even to construct sewers, however necessary these works may be, are among the least important of the duties which devolve upon you. But to improve the social condition of the poorer classes, to check the spread of disease, and to prolong the term of human life, while they are works of a high and ennobling character, are yet duties involving the gravest responsibility. Should less care be bestowed upon our fellow creatures than is daily afforded the lower animals? At the present moment the condition of many of the working classes is degraded in the extreme." The Medical Officer of Health for St. Saviour, Southwark, wrote (1856):-- "In all our efforts at sanitary improvement we are chiefly dealing with persons who in most instances have not the power of helping themselves, and who until of late have had no source to which they might apply for aid in rendering their dwellings clean and wholesome." The Medical Officer of Health in St. Pancras wrote:-- "All who have made themselves acquainted with the condition of many of the poor of London will agree with me when I say that before their moral or religious state is likely to be remedied, their physical condition must be improved, and their houses made more comfortable. On you devolves, to a great extent, the solemn responsibility for carrying out the preparatory work." The Medical Officer of Health for St. Martin-in-the-Fields wrote to his Vestry in 1858: "To permit such grievous evils as are to be seen in the worst localities of this great city is a contradiction to the teaching of Christianity ... such outrages on humanity as many of the abodes of the poor are permitted to remain. "It is unholy, it is unchristian, that people should herd together in such dens; and so long as such dwellings are allowed to be occupied our assumed religion must be a pretence and a sham...." And thus, the Medical Officer of Health for Bethnal Green:-- "To open out avenues through our cul-de-sac courts, to promote the sanitary condition of every house, to arrest by thorough drainage and removal of refuse the elimination of aerial poison, are the great duties that we have day by day to do. Though the task before us be great, the objects in view are immeasurably greater--to exalt the standard of life, to economise rates, and above all to decrease the sum of misery, disease, and death.... To supply the arm strong to labour, to substitute productive for unproductive citizens, to decrease the death-roll of the young, and to protract life beyond the present span, these are the tasks that sanitary science imposes on us." The Medical Officer of Health for Clerkenwell pointed out that-- "The poorer classes have not the means of remedying the defective sanitary conditions under which they are living. But the Vestry has this power."