Henry Jephson

“ Morality, and the whole economy of domestic existence, is outraged and deranged by so much suffering and misery. Let not, therefore, the morality, the health, the comfort of thousands of our fellow creatures in this metropolis be in the hands of those who care not about these things, but let good and wholesome laws be enacted to compel houses to be kept in a cleanly and healthy condition. ”

“ I must say it is a scandal to the present constitution of society that the reverse of this continues from year to year in spite of all suggestions of Medical Officers of Health, and the warnings of experience. In vain does one plague after another ravage the family of industrial orders, and like doomed men they stand amidst the harvest of death looking earnestly, but in vain, to the Legislature for that help which no other power can give. ”

“ To communities as well as to individuals there is nothing so expensive, so fatal to prosperity, as sickness. To a productive and labouring community, health is the chief estate.... A community is but a system of individuals—if one portion of that system be disabled by sickness, every other portion will feel the blow; the whole community will be taxed to support that part which is rendered incapable of supporting itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the period we have seen the end of many fever haunts. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of the old tenements removed and new abodes raised in their stead; but with it, alas! we have seen all the defects of new buildings, all the defects of badly laid drains, all the evils of work ill done, its dangers too often not capable of recognition until sickness and death forced the discovery. We have seen too often in the new houses defects of ventilation, of construction, of drainage, and of overcrowding: we have seen many an evil allowed by law, and over which we cannot extend our sanitary rules. ”

“ The house is filthy, the look of it is dingy and repulsive, the air is close and depressing; he is thirsty: the water-butt, decayed and lined with disgusting green vegetation, stands open nigh a drain, and foul liquids which cannot run off are about it, tainting it with an unwholesome and unpleasant taste; the refuse heap with decaying vegetable matter is near, and the dilapidated privy and cesspool send up heavy, poisonous, and depressing gases. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ No care is taken about the nature of the subsoil, the position, the ventilation, and means of cleanliness. They are run up anywhere and almost anyhow, and too often become the prolific source of disease.” And he [152] quotes: “No man has a right to erect a nuisance, and the public has clearly as good a right, as great an interest in enforcing cleanliness to prevent the outbreak of an epidemic as in requiring walls to prevent the spread of fire. Yet, where one is destroyed by fire, how many thousands are there destroyed by disease, the indirect result of such erections?” ”

“ Thus in 1886 the Medical Officer of Health for the south part of Poplar District drew special attention to a grievance long previously complained of and for many years endured.
“A greater scandal cannot well be shown in matters vital to health than that in spite of abundant evidence of the magnitude of the evil, thousands and tens of thousands of families living in houses, the rates of which are payable by the landlords, may at any moment, without a particle of fault of their own, be suddenly denied one of the first necessaries of life—water—through the neglect and wilfulness of others.” ”

“ Larger numbers of all classes were beginning to grasp the idea and to realise that the necessity of securing and guarding the public health was not a craze or form of mental aberration, but was of absolutely vital consequence, not merely to certain classes but to the great community of the metropolis and to the nation itself, and that the future welfare and power, even the very existence, of the nation are dependent upon it. ”

“ The consequences to the inhabitants of London of the absence of any efficient form of local government were dire in character, terrible in extent, and unceasing in operation. The higher grades of society suffered in some degree, as disease, begotten in filth and nurtured in poverty, often invaded with disastrous consequences the homes of the well-to-do; but it was by the great mass of the industrial classes and the poorer people that the terrible burden of insanitation had to be borne, and upon them that it fell with the deadliest effect. ”

“ We are a most melancholy parish, low in level and low in circumstances. The lowest and poorest of the human race drop from higher and richer parishes into our courts and alleys, and the liquid filth of higher places finds its way down to us. We receive the refuse as well as the outcomings of more happily situated places. ”

“ The non-existence of a central authority, or of any capable local authorities whose function it would have been to protect them from the causes of disease, had resulted in an insanitary condition which year after year entailed the waste of thousands upon thousands of lives. And the people, in the cruel circumstances of their position, were absolutely powerless to help themselves, and had no possible means of escape from the ever-present, all-surrounding danger. ”

“ The personal aggrandisement of the manufacturer must not be achieved by the spoliation of the property, the comforts, and the lives of his poorer neighbours....
“But the manufacturing interest is not a thing to be trifled with. Destroy the manufactures of Lambeth, and you starve its population. There are nuisances of more benefit than of injury to the community,” and he rather deprecated “a crusade against those interests, the untrammelled prosecution of which has raised this country to its present proud pre-eminence.” ”

“ George in Southwark—in his reports often dwelt upon this aspect of the subject:—
“The only true and lasting foundation upon which the glory and safety of a nation can be built must be upon the cultivation of the moral and physical powers belonging to man.”
“... The quality of a race is of far more importance than the quantity.”
“Health to the majority of the population is their only wealth; without it they become pauperised.”
“The welfare and safety of this country need a healthy, stalwart race of men—men who can labour and endure.” ”

“ The accumulated testimony of the most experienced and capable observers during half a century is clear and precise that overcrowding is disastrous to the physical welfare of the individual. The conditions of life are not much better in one- and two-roomed tenements, and the conclusion is thus forced upon us that, speaking broadly, a fifth of the population of London are at present living in circumstances where physical well-being is impossible, and where even a moderate standard of public health is unattainable. ”

“ Almost the whole of the existing evils lay in these tenement-houses, for it was there where the great mass of the disease, filth, and misery of London was to be found, and there where the greatest overcrowding, and the deepest moral and physical degradation existed. ”

“ Millions upon millions of money have had to be spent to make good—so far as could be made good—the ravages of past neglect and culpable management. Millions upon drainage, upon hospitals, upon houses for the working classes, upon open spaces—tens of millions upon water supply, and most unjustifiable and regrettable of all, millions to compensate slum owners for their iniquities. ”

“ Their idea of self-government too often is to govern for their own objects, and their own interests, regardless of the infinitely greater interests and rights of the great community around them; and when it is brought home to them that they are only a small integral part of a great community, that their sphere of self-government can only be a very limited one, and that they cannot be allowed either by action or neglect to injure the community, they resent it with no little outcry. ”

“ If one set of people failed in their duty to the public, it was but right that where such tremendous issues were at stake as the health and physical well-being, not merely of the people of one parish but of over three and a quarter millions of people—and all that their health and well-being implied—the administration of the law should be placed in hands that would administer it. ”

“ London, the great metropolis, the capital of the Empire itself, constitutes, by the number of its inhabitants, so large a portion of the United Kingdom, that the health of its people is a very material factor in that of the kingdom. It has a population greater than either Scotland or Ireland, greater than any of our Colonies, except Canada and Australasia, greater than that of many foreign States— [2] “the greatest aggregate of human beings that has ever existed in the history of the world in the same area of space.” ”

“ In addition thereto, and now more than ever of primary importance, was the great duty of inspection—inspection of houses, and of rooms in houses, and of workshops, and often the consequent proceedings for the abatement of nuisances, or the punishment of offenders.
“House-to-house inspection,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Islington in 1893, “is the only efficient remedy for extensive sanitary evils. It is the life and soul of sanitary work.” ”

“ The favourite principle that an Englishman’s house was his castle was used as a defence against any suggestion that the malpractices committed therein should be curbed.
Others argued, “I am entitled to do what I like with my own.”
“We everywhere find people ready to declare in respect to every evil: There is not any law that could compel its removal, the place complained of being private property.”
All sorts of far-fetched and strained arguments were devised by them in the efforts to evade responsibility for the infamous condition of their property, and to defend and justify inaction. ”

“ To the enthusiasm of an individual, and not of the Government, was due the first effective attempt to grapple with one of the widespread, deep-seated evils which were working such havoc among the people. The most disastrous and vicious forms of overcrowding were at the time to be found in the so-called Common Lodging Houses—the sink of insanitary abominations. ”

“ Hence, great blocks of ground absolutely covered with buildings, back to back, side to side, any way so long as a building could by any ingenuity be fitted in. Hence the culs-de-sac, the small and stifling courts and alleys. Nor were there any regulations forbidding certain kinds of buildings which would be injurious to the health of their inhabitants. Hence the mean and flimsy and insanitary houses which were being erected in the outer circle of the metropolis, and which wrought havoc with the health and lives of the people. ”

“ Some at least of this mortality is preventable. If we could keep to the average of all London we should lose 300 less a year; or even to that of Bethnal Green we should lose 200 less.
“Few people believe we are so bad as we really are, and if we do not believe we shall not of course try to mend it, but it cannot be denied.
“The rich Londoners pay a low poor-rate. The poor Londoners pay a high poor-rate. This bears hardly upon us; it stifles us: more and more packed, more and more impoverished; with very little space between the poor ratepayer and the pauper, there is more sickness and death. ”

“ It is the abiding host of disease, the endemic and not the epidemic pestilence, the permanent overhanging mist of infection, the annual slaughter doubling in its ravages our bloodiest fields of conflict, that we are now summoned to grapple with. ”

“ I am compelled to say that the number of dingy and dilapidated houses is a proof either that the owners of house property do not exercise sufficient control over their tenants, or that they themselves are grievously neglectful of their duties to their tenants and to society at large. The health of the Parish should not be allowed to suffer through the default of either landlord or tenant.... ”

“ The steady growth of London westward has thrown among us a vast and teeming population of the working classes, as well as those of more well-to-do condition, and for the housing of the former many blocks of wretched and most miserably constructed dwellings continue to be erected with the most utter disregard for drainage or other sanitary appliances now so essential. That part of Fulham, once open fields, is still being rapidly covered with streets and houses of this character, and many open spots in Hammersmith are being filled in the same way. ”