Page:The government of London.djvu/16

 summer of 1854, the members of both Houses grew personally alarmed at the stench that invaded their halls of conference whenever the tide happened to rise during the afternoon. How long the unhappy dwellers from Lambeth to Wapping Old Stairs might have sniffed and sickened without a remedy for the mischief, or without measures being taken to cleanse the polluted current, had it not been for the consternation which providentially fell on the three estates of the realm, in Parliament assembled, Heaven only knows. But day after day, when Tory peers and Radical commoners grew equally uncomfortable, when committees found it difficult to make up a quorum, and advocates declared that if the windows were not kept shut they could not go on; when squires once rubicund showed the white feather, and dyspeptic officials muffled their nostrils with handkerchiefs steeped in eau de Cologne, there came about a general agreement that the Thames must be somehow washed clean, and that the quicker the method the better, whatever the cost or form. Arterial drains for the whole metropolis, whereby all sewage should be diverted from the river and carried underground to the sea, were declared to be indispensable, and a metropolitan authority must be constituted to carry into effect the operation. Nothing short of a general rate would suffice for an undertaking so vast; but statistics were not wanting to convince Bloomsbury and Tyburnia that they too were interested in its completion. Not only in ill-built suburbs and overcrowded quarters of the town, but in many whose high rents guaranteed their gentility, numberless dwellings were to be found without any description of sewerage. An instance was given by the President of the Board of Health of a street containing seventy first-class houses, of which but two had any communication with the main sewer: and out of three hundred and sixty thousand inhabited dwellings, nearly one-half were said to be similarly circumstanced.

As every district was thus supposed to be equally interested, all should be equally represented; and as the difficulty and costliness of the enterprise demanded that men of known probity and judgment should compose the new Council, resort was had to the method of indirect or double election. A vestry or board should be elected by the rated householders for each large parish or union of small parishes,