Page:The government of London.djvu/22

 punctually defraying their obligations. A few, with fainter hearts and a heavier burthen of decent indigence to weigh them down, have been unable financially to follow in their footsteps, and have been afraid to face the difficulties that beset every effort to clear away the decaying haunts of misery, and the substitution of healthful and more civilized habitations. The wear and tear of highways in places of through traffic has proved intolerably expensive; in others it gives nobody a serious thought; and then some blockhead, smitten with the mania for doing sums and statistics, takes out the mileage, population, and ratable property in two metropolitan antipodes, and by a rule of three works out a solemn balance of condemnation against the hard-driven and specious praise of the happy-go-lucky subjects of his contrast. One of the first obligations laid upon each vestry and district board was the inspection of nuisances, and the question of staff for the purpose was disposed of by bureaucratic cynicism with the flippant sarcasm that where nuisances abounded inspectors, it was to be hoped, would especially abound. There was little hesitation in wealthier localities about appointing inspectors at a hundred a year to keep a look-out, as they walked abroad upon their ordinary callings, for any infringement of sanitary rules; and five-sixths of the neighbourhood being occupied with mansions, shrubberies, public institutions, parks, and dwellings of the well-to-do classes, there could not have been much danger of the gentlemen inspectors having too much to do. But not far off, though in a different square of the statutable chess-board where few of these dainty items of ratable property were to be found, the suspicion and savour of nuisance being rife, difficulties arose in getting the right sort of man to be an inspector, and greater difficulties in getting him voted adequate pay. Instances might be named of but one inspector at five and twenty shillings a week in a work-a-day district where two or three would have ample occupation, but where the circumstances that rendered more surveillance needful were exactly those that rendered the local authorities unwillingly parsimonious, prompting them continually to recur to the sad and shabby text of "what is the lowest possible to get the work done for?" Whereupon philosophistry curls its official lip, scornful of the inefficiency of local inspection in the vulgar regions—