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11
more than to any one future event, I look with certainty
that it will vastly increase your means of
reforming domestic uncleanliness among the poor,
and will relieve you from an amount of obstruction,
which hitherto has all but paralyzed your most
useful powers.
Three years later—though it seems long to wait
for so desirable a consummation—and Sir Benjamin
Hall's Metropolis Local Management Act will have
procured the dispollution of the Thames. Not
only will the extreme sanitary evils of tidal drainage
have been included in this reform; but, between
your long river-side boundary and the opposite flats
of Surrey, there will once more flow a stream
which may be regarded with complacency, as the
means of healthy ventilation through the heart of
London.
In modes to which I have referred, so much has
been done or is doing, and the promise of advantage
is so great, that it seems almost invidious to point out
what remains undone. Yet I hope you will allow
me to remind you of one very great intended good,
which hitherto exists only in intention. The City
of London possesses no public baths, no public
laundries, no model dwellings. These institutions,
which in their relation to the poor are beyond most
things reformatory and educational, and which seem