Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/375

Rh 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 sanitary 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 8½ visits to each. That indicates, I think, much passive resistance, 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, however, 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. And 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 overhauled 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 unfortunate 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