Inspection was in the air: the Factory Inspectors of 1834 were followed ...

Inspection was in the air: the Factory Inspectors of 1834 were followed by the Prison Inspectors, and these by the School Inspectors, the Railway Inspectors, and the Mines Inspectors. The Inspectors, like the higher officials, were often men of mature experience who came to their duties with ideas already formed.

Leonard Hornet, whose reports underlie so much of our industrial legislation, was nearing fifty when he entered the Factory department, and was already a man of note in education and science. Hugh Tremenheere, joining the Education department at thirty-five, had fourteen Acts of Parliament to his credit when he retired.

With them must be ranked the specialists in public health; above all, Southwood Smith and John Simon.

Smith, a Unitarian minister, whose devotional writings must have had some singular quality to be admired both by Wordsworth and Byron, came late to the profession of medicine, but he found his place at once with an Essay on Fever. Cholera was a visitor: typhus a resident who Southwood Smith believed could be expelled.