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42
CONCLUSION.
meanwhile, in the absence of these sanitary works,
there are dying needlessly and prematurely thousands
of the population ; that preventable death, hitherto
unprevented, is proceeding at its accustomed pace ;
that children continue to perish at three or four
times their due rate; that time, which carries us
from one visitation of the great epidemic and
obliterates the remembrance of our alarm, also, too
probably, carries us towards the day of another
outbreak; that typhus—our home-bred and daily
visitant, rehearses the same warnings as heretofore,
moving uniformly onward, like the shadow on
a dial, toward the hour when that Eastern pestilence
may again be here.
Therefore, gentlemen, I have felt it my duty to
represent to you that, in the promotion of those
metropolitan works, the population of the City of
London have an incalculable interest;—that the
emancipation of human life from such fetters of
disease as weigh on it, can never even approximate
to completion within your City, while the
saturated burial-grounds still continue to receive
their annual multitudes of the dead, while the
administration of the water-supply interposes an
effectual hindrance to your mo6t important functions,
and while the river, contaminated and un-embanked,
diffuses injurious miasms through the whole extent
of your jurisdiction. And I would further venture
to urge on the consideration of your Honourable
Court, that your legitimate influence with Her