1868. } ( 125.) 
THE PUBLIC HEALTH. 
Ir any one wishes for a demonstration of the need of change in 
the Municipal Management of London, he should visit the Metro- 
polis just after a snow storm. Such a storm visited London on 
the night of the 8th of December, 1867. The next morning, 
although hundreds of poor men were begging in the streets, being 
thrown out of work by the snow, there was no effort made to clear 
the streets and pavements of that snow; and the consequence was 
that, snow being trampled by the feet of men and horses into ice, 
numerous accidents to men and horses occurred. That the streets 
are allowed to remain in this disgraceful state does not arise from 
want of legal power to put them in a safe condition, but from an 
entire neglect of duty. Thus the police have the power to fine 
every person forty shillings who does not cleanse the footway in 
front of his house before a given time after a fall of snow; but they 
seldom or ever exercise this power. The greatest sinners in this 
respect are the government offices and the authorities who preside 
over our public parks. The footway around these parks is never 
swept. ‘The vestries try to clean the streets, but their surveyors 
never have organizing skill enough to get the poor unemployed men 
together to do this necessary work. If the snow cannot be got away, 
an immense saving of horse flesh and horse pain would be effected 
by throwing gravel or sand down the principal thoroughfares. But 
the vestries will not see what they have to do with protecting stran- 
gers’ horses passing through their thoroughfares. The loss by the 
payment for gravel and labour would appear against them in the rate 
book, and as the saving of life would not appear, they will have 
nothing to do with it. We should not have referred so much in 
detail to this London grievance if it were not that it illustrates a 
ae London is badly managed because it is split up into forty 
estries, no two of which will act in concert, and none of them will 
do anything for the public good. Above all things we want in 
London public-spirited men, men who will sacrifice their own pri- 
vate interests and that of their parishes for the public good. It is 
too much to expect that the forty or fifty little parliaments by which 
the Metropolis is governed, with their two or three thousand mem- 
bers should ever produce a majority of public-spirited men. The 
present system is the worst possible that could be devised for secu- 
ring the public good. What we really want is that the Metropolis 
should be governed as a whole, and that it should not be split 
up into forty or fifty parishes, each having its own narrow-minded 
