THE FIGHTING FIFTIES 147

the establishment in 1855 of the Metropolitan Board of Works
—forerunner of the London County Council—did the evil begin
to abate.

Not only inertia and a certain native spirit of muddle, un-
tamed by the discipline of established leadership, but the selfish-
ness of vested interests operated to keep mid-Victorian London
dirty and unhealthy. Two scandalous examples were the
state of Smithfield—another Troy, reeking with the carcases
of half a million beasts slaughtered annually in the heart
of the City, which stood a ten years' siege by the sanitary re-
formers—and the privilege of intra-mural burial still claimed
under ancient charters by private dynasties of citizens. These
suicidal rights, automatically repeopling the piled-up church-
yards, continued unabated until 1852. This was all part of the
intense and traditional individualism of England: up to 1851,
any one could open a slaughtering yard. Private citizens like
Mr. Boffin made fortunes out of suburban dust-heaps—stinking
fly-haunted abominations poisoning the atmosphere for miles
round—and the city bakehouses were little better than common
nuisances.

So too in the narrow crowded streets pandemonium was long
permitted in the sacred name of liberty. The drivers of the 2d*
buses, growing in numbers as well as in girth, raced" each other
through the City while their stripe-trousered "cads'* or con-
ductors ran shouting beside them, sometimes almost dragging
unwilling passengers into their vehicles. The pavements were
blocked with long, rotating files of wretched men encased in
huge quadrilateral sandwich boards, and the narrow streets with
advertising carts towering ever higher like moving pagodas in
the attempt to overshadow one other. Vans stuck fast between
the stone posts that still served to mark the footways: vendors
of vegetables with wheel-barrows and ragged organ-grinders
paraded the cobbled gutters. In the national mania for turning
everything to money-making the very paving-stones were
scrawled with injunctions to buy so-and-so's wares. Bill-stickers
were allowed to cover every vacant wall and hoarding with
advertisements, beggars, their clothes caked with a layer of
phosphorescent grime, to exhibit their sores and destitution.
Within a stone's throw of the heart of London, Leicester Square,
formerly the home of great artists, was a "dreary abomination
of desolation." In its centre a headless statue, perpetually bom-