Metropolitan Sanitary Association Anniversary Banquet

My Lord and Gentlemen, I am placed in that peculiarly advantageous position for speaking, that I must either turn from the chairman or from the company. But, as the company includes that best and brightest of all company, whose presence (I assume) we're supposed not to recognise on these occasions as we never address them – and, as I have abundant experience of the innate courtesy and politeness of my noble friend – I shall take the cause which I am sure will be most agreeable to him, and turn to this assembly in general. Indeed, gentlemen, I have but a few words to say, either on the needfulness of Sanitary Reform, or on the consequent usefulness of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association.

That no one can estimate the amount of mischief which is grown in dirt; that no man can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either in its physical or moral results, when both begin in the cradle and are not at rest in the obscene grave, is now as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, and that if you once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in St. Giles’s, no mortal list of Lady Patronesses can keep it out of Almack’s.

Twelve or fifteen years ago some, of the first valuable reports of Mr. Chadwick and of Dr. Southwood Smith strengthening and much enlarging my previous imperfect knowledge of this truth, made me, in my sphere, earnest in this Sanitary Cause. And I can honestly declare tonight, that all the use I have since made of my eyes – or nose – that all the information I have since been able to acquire through any of my senses, has strengthened me in the conviction that Searching Sanitary Reform must precede all other social remedies, and that even Education and Religion can do nothing where they are most needed, until the way is paved for their ministrations by Cleanliness and Decency. Am I singular in this opinion? You will remember the speech made this night by the Right Reverend Prelate, which no true Sanitary Reformer can have heard without emotion. What avails it to send a Missionary to me, a miserable man or woman living in a foetid Court where every sense bestowed upon me for my delight becomes a torment, and every month of my life is new mire added to the heap under which I lie degraded? To what natural feeling within me is he to address himself? What ancient chord within me can he hope to touch? Is it my remembrance of my children? Is it a remembrance of distortion and decay, scrofula and fever? Would he address himself to my hopes of immortality? I am so surrounded by material filth that my Soul can not rise to the contemplation an immaterial existence! Or, if I be a miserable child, born and natured in the same wretched place, and tempted, in these better times, to the Ragged School, what can the few hours’ teaching that I get there do for me, against the noxious, constant, ever-renewed lesson of my whole existence. But, give me my first glimpse of Heaven through a little of its light and air – give me water – help me to be clean – lighten this heavy atmosphere in which my spirit droops and I become the indifferent and callous creature that you see me – gently and kindly take the body of my dead relation out of the small room where I grow to be so familiar with the awful change that even its sanctity is lost to me – and, Teacher, then I’ll hear, you know how willingly, of Him whose thoughts were so much with the Poor, and who had compassion for all human sorrow!

I am now, gentlemen, to propose to you as a toast a public Body without whose efficient aid this preparation so much to be desired, for Christianity at home, cannot be effected; and, by whom, if we earnestly desire such preparation, we must stand, giving them all the support it is in our power to render. I mean, the Board of Health. We have a transparent instance very near at hand of the mysterious arrangement that no great thing can possibly be done without a certain amount of nonsense being talked about it in the way of objection. Much as I respected friend the Ex-unprotected Female was confounded, at that family dinner party where we last heard of her, by some alarming conversation respecting the sparrows in Mr. Paxton's gutters, and the casks of gunpowder sent to the Great Exposition under the semblance of coffee, so, I dare say, it has been the fortune of most of us to hear the Board of Health discussed in various congenial circles. I've never been able to make out, distinctly, more than two objections to it; the first is expressed in a long word which I seem to have heard pronounced with a sort of violent relish on two or three previous occasions – Centralization.

Now, gentlemen, in the year before last, in the time of the cholera, you had an excellent opportunity of judging between this Centralization on the one hand, and what I may be permitted to call Vestrylization on the other. You may recollect the Reports of the Board of Health on the subject of cholera, and you may recollect the Reports of the discussions on the same subject at some Vestry Meetings. I have the honour – of which I am very sensible – to be one of the constituent body of the amazing Vestry of Marylebone; and if you chance to remember (as you very likely do) what the Board of Health did, in Glasgow and other places, and what my vestry said, you will probably agree with me that between this so-called Centralization, and this Vestrylization, the former is by far the best thing to stand by in an emergency. My vestry even took the high ground of denying the existence of cholera in any unusual degree. And though that denial had no greater effect upon the disease than my vestry’s denial of the existence of Jacob’s Island had upon the Earth about Bermondsey, the circumstance may be suggestive to you in considering what Vestrylization is, when a few noisy little landlords interested in the maintenance of abuses, struggle to the foremost ranks; and what the so-called Centralization is when it is a combination of active business habits, sound medical knowledge, and a zealous sympathy with the sufferings of the people.

But gentlemen there is, as I have said, another objection to the Board of Health. It is conveyed in the shorter and less alarming word – delay. Now, I need not suggest to you that it would surely be unreasonable to object to a first-rate chronometer that it wouldn't go – when its owner wouldn't wind it up. Yet I cannot help thinking, I must plainly avow, that the Board of Health is in the parallel position of being excellently adapted for going, being very willing and anxious to go, but not being able to go, because its lawful master has fallen into a gentle slumber, and forgotten to set it a-going. As a component particle of this association which my Noble friend in the chair considers useful as a gentle stimulus to governments, I must take leave to say that I do not, and can not, consider the Board of Health responsible for delay in sanitary reforms. Lord Robert Grosvenor referred just now to Lord Castlereagh’s favourite adage, that you must never hallo until you are out of the Wood. It occurred to me that with a very slight addition that would be an excellent adage for all Sanitary Reformers: to wit, that you must never hallo until you're out of the Woods – and Forests.

If I may venture to make the remark under the presiding of my Noble friend whom we are all glad to see, and would all have been so happy to retain, in those leafy regions, I would say that since the remote period when ‘the noble Savage’ ran wild there, some other Nobles – not savages by any means, but gentlemen of high accomplishments and worth – have' gone a little wild in the same districts and wandered rather more languidly out of the direct path than is quite good for the public. You will of course understand that in saying this, I merely express my own individual misgivings. But I will tell you why I entertain them. Considering the Report of the Board of Health on Intra-mural Interments to be one of the most remarkable social documents ever issued under any Government, and an honour to the country and the time, I cannot but believe that the Board of Health would have advanced a little quicker in the carrying-out of the measure founded upon it but for some stoppage in the way above them which we don't clearly see. Remembering the vigour and perspicuity with which they have indicated to us the chief Sanitary evils it is essential to remove, I cannot hold them responsible for the prolonged existence of those evils. As with  omission, so with commission. Remembering how clearly they showed us the advantages of a continuous supply of soft water, and how they pointed out to us an abundant source of supply, I cannot cast upon them the blame of a measure which gives us only hard water. Remembering how they dwelt upon the necessity of a combination of water-works, I cannot charge them with the injury of perpetuated separation. Remembering how they demonstrated to us that disease must lurk in houses founded over cesspools or built upon foundations saturated with cesspool matter, I cannot hold them responsible for a system of drainage which does not remove these ills. And therefore, gentlemen, both for the good they have done, and for the good they may be fairly assumed to have had the will to do, but not the power, I commend the Board of Health to you as especially deserving and requiring the sympathy, the encouragement, and the support of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association.

I shall beg, in conclusion, to couple with the toast the name of a Noble Lord, one of its members, whose Earnestness in all good works no man can doubt, and who always has the courage to face the and commonest of all cants; that is to say, the cant about the cant of philanthropy and benevolence. I propose to you Lord Ashley and the Board of Health.