consolidate and elevate rather than startle by some new device, to underpin, enlarge, and copy with improvement rather than subvert to make room for the transcript of some foreign design. When he had to build anew, he preferred to build upon old English lines, and to construct so that his legislative work should be in keeping as far as possible with what had gone before. Municipal corporations, independent and powerful, were, he saw, peculiarly wanted to redeem from political incontinuity and social nervelessness the communities around the seat of government: and the fact that they were passive and dumb for the most part was to him the strongest proof of all that they needed institutions whose working would impart the sense of healthful and active citizenship. But he had not the drawing of the Bill, and the opportunity was lost. Sir Benjamin Hall, whose constituents had for some time been urging him to obtain for them some remedy for the anomalies and inequalities of their local condition, readily undertook to play the part of godfather to a scheme modelled on that of Paris,[1] and which probably would never have been proposed, and certainly would not have been carried, but for an unanticipated nuisance which had rapidly grown intolerable in Westminster, not in Marylebone; in the City, not in Mayfair.
Notwithstanding the rapid increase of building for domestic and manufacturing purposes on both sides of the river, it had long preserved its early character for clearness and salubrity. Little heed was taken by his its easy-going Conservators of the gradual substitution of steamboats for tardier means of transport, or of the increasing refuse from noxious traders, and the outfall from deleterious factories. The quickness of the current when the tide went down, and its supposed cleansing power when it rose, served for an answer to the fastidious who grumbled, or the hypochondriacal who refused to be comforted when told that the fish were as lively as yesterday and yet more abundant. But when science began to be practically applied to the health of dwellings, and to the development of husbandry, unfair advantage was taken of the accommodating stream.
Every year agricultural drainage and urban drainage more and more troubled its flow, until at last, during the hot
- ↑ Mr. Mackinnon, debate on Bill, May 14, 1855.
