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the world, With an inkling of common sense. Let me add, that had I been
gifted with the talents adequate to the scientific enterprise, and had had the
honor of being one of the authorities, I can scarcely sec, making allowance
for nature's frailties, how I could have avoided certain conventional snares.
Or again, if any other live gentlemen were to be selected as a second Commission
of Enquiry—from the West end of course—endowed with a stoical
and inflexible sense of duty, thinking it only decorous at the outset to disclaim
any, the very remotest knowledge of the East of London, in exploring
the River Lea and its tributaries, except from the guidance of the pocket
compass; and yet anon there would turn up, I venture to say, such a reference
to antecedents, such a comparing of notes, such an outflow of amenities,
and all that sort of thing, that it is ten to one before they had well recovered
their heads, their heels would be found exactly in the rut of their predecessors.
How far this influence might have been set at naught, had five gentlemen
from the Imperial Academy of Medicine, for instance, been deputed, or
others, owing no fealty for their official possessions, I am not prepared to
say; but among the curious it may serve very well for conjecture.
The opinions on the late epidemic since my Report of 1866, which
have assumed a public importance, having the impress of authority, have been
those of Capt. Tyler, R.E., on behalf of the Board of Trade; Mr. J. N.
Radcliffe, from the Privy Council; and Mr. Simon, the Medical Officer of
the Privy Council, whose commentaries are the closing and official authority.
After the outburst of Cholera, and the authorities had denounced the
Old Ford water first as the exciting, and subsequently as its aggravating
cause, the public very reasonably took alarm, and memorialized the Board of
Trade for an enquiry, basing their application on three principal allegations—
1. That the water was bad.
2. That it was deficient in quantity.
3. That it was mainly the cause of the "explosion."
The enquiry on behalf of the memorialists, in the form of an Association,
was conducted by an enterprising attorney, Mr. Trice, fully alive to the
interests of the public health and other benevolent considerations, and it would
be doing them great injustice to deny that solid service was afforded to the