210 Manchester : its Sanitary and Social State. [April, 



report was ordered to be sent to the Town Clerk of Manchester. 

 On Monday, the 7th, an inspector visited the house, and instructed 

 the owner, or his agent, to have the house cleansed and dis- 

 infected before admitting fresh tenants. Nothing was done until 

 the 10th, when two men set to work, and by the afternoon of the 

 next day, had lime-washed the ceilings and the walls of the two 

 u]3per rooms. 



By that time, also, some fresh tenants had arrived. A very 

 respectable-looking woman, with four little children, was found 

 sitting, with a look of dismay, in the midst of a quantity of very 

 good and clean furniture, bed-stocks, bedding, &c, which she had 

 brought ten miles out of the country, and which was lying on the 

 filthy floor of the sitting-room, and resting against the infected 

 wall-paper. The palliasse found in the house when first visited 

 had disappeared. It had probably been taken away, and sold for 

 what it would fetch. The cotton-flocks on which some of the fever- 

 stricken family had lain until their removal to the hospital, being 

 unsaleable, had, without any attempt at disinfection, been thrown 

 into the ash-pit, common to the fever-house and several neigh- 

 bouring houses. Verily, the Nuisance Authority in Manchester has 

 solved the problem, how not to do it. The publication in the local 

 newspapers of the above facts, caused a little stir among the dry 

 bones. The discovery was made that the 22nd section of the Sani- 

 tary Act, 1866, made it the duty of the Nuisance Authority, after 

 obtaining the certificate of a medical practitioner, to disinfect such 

 houses, provided it was not done by their owners. The City Council 

 furnished the different Boards of Guardians in Manchester with 

 blank forms of such certificate, with the request that when neces- 

 sary they might be filled up by their medical officers. 



Any one, it appears, but those whose duty it is by Act of 

 Parliament, may perform the functions of the Nuisance Authority 

 in Manchester. 



Those who have heard or read the speeches recently made by 

 the advocates of the Corporation, in Manchester or elsewhere, may 

 be inclined to think that in some of the foregoing remarks they 

 have been unfairly dealt with. With an air of injured innocence 

 which would be amusing if the subject were not too serious, they 

 have gone about representing themselves as cruelly persecuted by 

 the " Theorizing Sanitary Keformers " because they are not prepared, 

 at the bidding of a section only of those gentlemen, to abolish the 

 dry-closet system which has grown up in Manchester, and substitute 

 for it that of water-closets. They thus hope to avail themselves of 

 the dissensions among their critics as an excuse for doing nothing. 

 But as has been shown, it is an utter perversion of language to call 

 the system established in Manchester the dry system, and the im- 

 plied state of hesitation does not exist. In the minds of our real 



