A SANITARY OUTLOOK 37 1 



in connection with the highly complicated problems they present for 

 our consideration, amongst which suggestions, the not least prominent 

 will be one for the strengthening of your hands. I feel keenly, that 

 if the housing question in towns is to be adequately dealt with the sani- 

 tary inspector must have more power in his elbow than he has hithertd 

 had. He must have security of tenure, and I am glad to be able to tell 

 you that the preventive medicine section, over which I presided, at the 

 recent Public Health Congress in London, passed a resolution desiring 

 the council to represent to the government the urgent importance of 

 giving security of tenure to the sanitary inspector, as well as to the 

 medical officer of health. Then, the sanitary inspector must have more 

 effective control over the nuisances he discovers, and the only way to 

 give him that is to make his ' intimations ' equivalent to a legal notice. 

 These intimations are, I understand, now often treated as waste paper. 

 There are agents and owners of property, of the baser sort, who delight 

 in thwarting and putting obstacles in the way of sanitary inspectors, 

 and to such gentlemen I should give short shrift, showing no particular 

 indulgence to the slum-owner generally. Dr. Harris, medical officer of 

 Health for Islington, reported lately, that in his district 60,296 visits 

 were last year paid by the sanitary inspectors to 7,133 properties, on an 

 average 8^ visits to each. That indicates, I think, much passive re- 

 sistance, much waste of energy, much unnecessary maintenance of 

 dangers to health, and I agree with Dr. Harris that in this matter ' Law 

 ought to be brought into line with common sense ' without delay. 



It is to rural housing, more especially in its relation with the relief 

 of overcrowding in towns, that I had intended to direct your attention 

 to-day, but my excursions into the apjoroaches to that subject have left 

 me only a few minutes in which to touch on it. The main point, how- 

 ever, is — and on that I have already insisted— that by improving our 

 country cottages and adding to them cottages of an approved type, we 

 shall in some degree check the exodus from the country and even set 

 up a back-wash from the towns. x\nd in order that we may do that 

 we must have amended the building bv-laws that have been in no 

 small measure answerable for the depopulation of rural districts and 

 for the congested state of towns. That these by-laws require to be over- 

 hauled and remodeled, no one who has read Mr. Wilfred Blunt's article 

 in the Nineteenth Century, or the speeches made by the members of 

 the deputation that waited on Mr. Walter Long, then president of the 

 Local Government Board in November last, can doubt. The unfor- 

 tunate clause in the public health act of 1875, providing that poor law 

 districts might declare themselves urban districts and so require 

 powers similar to those exercised in towns, and frame by-laws of their 

 own, has been the source of all the mischief. Under this clause half 

 the rural districts of England have acquired urban powers which, being 



