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64
ice-sellers, and French organ-grinders is gradually creeping
into the parish from Holborn, whose habits are filthy and
unsanitary in the extreme.
These disorderly people and their children require proper
training, which I hoped years ago, would have been acquired
by means the School Board; but it has not occurred. In fact,
many women, who when young, have been in service, and have
kept an eight-roomed house in perfect order under a mistress,
when living in one or two rooms of their own, allow them to
become a mass of dirt. Let us hope however, that a better state
of things may come, but it is evident that many of the newly
proposed "Regulations" for improvements refer rather to
condition of ornamental repair of the dwellings than to requirements
of health. In fact, after daily inspection of the dwellings
of the poor for more than 40 years, and hearing the remarks
made upon them, I cannot help thinking, that those who legislate
in the matter should be landlords, for a time at least, to enable
them to become acquainted with the relation of repairs to
reckless damage.
At all events, it is evident, that the condition of the Parish,
described as worse than it has ever been before, does not relate
to its sanitary condition; which, through the incessant labours of
the Vestry, has continued to improve, in spite of the increase of
a lower class of population. Moreover, when it is recollected,
that our worst courts, the terrible Turnmill Street courts, Ledbury
Place, Wood's Place, Suffolk Court, Caroline Court, and many
others have been demolished, and replaced by the fine model
buildings—Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Buildings, Compton
Buildings, Cobden Buildings, and Peabody Buildings, and
that several hundreds of underground kitchens have been
emptied, not to mention the innumerable drainage, water supply,
and other defects, which have been remedied during past years,
to say that the condition of the Parish is not improving, is
monstrous—it is not true.