City fathers get serious

Our city fathers are at last going about their affairs in a businesslike way, and are setting seriously to work on the necessary improvements which have lain so long in abeyance.

The original cause of the delay in our municipal progress arose from the absolute or imaginary defects in the Act of Incorporation of 1861, and although measures were introduced to provide a temporary remedy for these defects, ratepayers always regarded the collection of city dues with suspicion — a feeling that we are happy to say will no longer exist, as the statutes will be placed beyond cavil, and the proper authority conveyed to our city officers for the enforcement of the bylaws where necessary.

We do not, however, look for any opposition to the rates levied for municipal requirements, since they will be expended for the benefit of all. In the first place, there is no disguising the fact that cholera, the fell destroyer, is making rapid strides toward us; he is already hurrying numbers of the Central American people to their last account, and we may expect him here ere long.

We all know in what a wretched state of filth many of the streets and gutters are, in the most thickly populated portions of the city, to say nothing of the condition of our suburbs.

To allow these sources of infection to remain till the warm weather sets in would be an absolute invitation to this most dreadful of epidemics. We need hardly say, then, that the prompt payment of the rates levied in accordance with the bylaw will enable our worthy mayor and councillors to take immediate steps to remove all causes of atmospheric impurity, so as to mitigate, as far as may be, any aid to the continuance of the plague. The Daily British Colonist and Victoria Chronicle,

Feb. 14, 1867