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HABITATIONS AND SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE POOR. 85
appeared to me of immeasurable weight in the
sanitary fluctuations of the City, as tending in their
operation constantly to thwart your endeavours for
improvement, and to neutralize day by day whatever
good you could achieve.
I reported to you that there were sanitary defects,
inherent in certain large proportions of your
municipal cure, which the most absolute control of
drainage and water-supply would do nothing to
amend,—constructional defects of houses and of
courts, whereby their crowded inhabitants were
excluded from a sufficiency of light and air, and
were constrained, without remission or change, to
breathe an atmosphere foetid with their own stagnant
exhalations. I reported to you that, however
unexceptionable might be the arrangement of such
localities in matters already within your control—
however clean their pavements, however pure their
water, however effective their drainage, yet fever
and the allied disorders could never be absent from
their population; while under opposite arrangements,
with nuisances around them, with organic
poisons rising from the soil or mingling in the
water, their mortality would rise to the horrors of
pestilence, and might easily renew the most awful
precedents in history. I described to you the class
of miserable dwellings alluded to—" Courts and
alleys with low, dark, filthy tenements, hemmed in
on all sides by higher buildings, having no possibility
of any current of air, and (worst of all) some-
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