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83
serious damage to property. If these two sanitary requirements
can be secured, I feel assured nothing will be
wanting to render the great culverts that have been
constructed in the Sub-district, in common with all other
localities, as complete and efficient as the most exacting
sanitarian can desire or expect. It is with considerable
gratification I am able to report the result of the persevering
efforts to improve that important thoroughfare, the
Disraeli Road, and to make up its first foot and carriage
ways that had so unwisely been suffered by the owners of
property there to assume such a chronic form of filth as to
give the street more the appearance of a bog than anything
else with which it could be compared. After much
opposition to the reasonable suggestions of the authorities,
the road has at length been put into a passable condition,
and there is now a prospect of other new streets and roads
that have been more or less neglected—neglected because
of the doubts that have long exisited as to the legal powers
vested in local authorities to interfere—being made to
follow suit.
It could be wished that the same determined action
could be taken in respect to that long complained of
nuisance on the Priory Estate, Roehampton. It seems,
however, that some legal subtilities still obstruct the
solution of the difficult question of who is to be held
responsible for the maintenance of such a gross nuisance
as that referred to. It is right I should report that the
last visit paid by the Surveyor and myself to the site of
this nuisance disclosed nothing which could afford even a
reasonable hope at present, without the further intervention
of the law, of seeing this filthy open ditch completely cut
off from its connecting drains, which continue to pour
into it most of the sewage and the excreta of the
numerous persons who inhabit the Asylum—albeit the
law* has recently decided that the proprietor of the
* The result of recent proceedings in Chancery.