Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/142

4, 1860.] has become a black ditch, and the floating-baths that erewhile served to wash the London population in mid-stream have disappeared. The nuisance that had descended from the dwellings of the rich in water-percolation has turned back upon them in air-percolation. Whitebait dinners at Blackwall cause the gorge to rise with the pollution of the breathing organs.

The Board of Health, as represented by Mr. Edwin Chadwick, had an obstinate idea—a one idea—that cheapness consisted in low cost. Carrying away refuse is a matter of transit, and no transit is so cheap as water-transit. Once on a time a huge mass of mud had collected in one of the reservoirs of a water company. The engineer cubed out the quantities, and the cost of carting away and finding a site for the mud. It was too dear, so the horses and carts were dispensed with, and a number of workmen were set to work to stir up this mud while the water was put in motion, and it was all carried away in the stream—to what place of deposit was not asked.

Mr. Chadwick was delighted with the result, and recorded it, if I mistake not, in one of the blue-books. It got a hold of his mind, and water transit in sewers became thenceforward an idea. All the sewers were reduced, in his imagination, and glazed pipelets of clay were henceforward the be-all and end-all of drainage with constant streams of water running through them. Housemaids were to be enjoined to suffer no scrubbing-brushes to pass into them, and water was to be the solvent for every difficulty.

Now, if, with only half London closeted, the Thames is brought to the condition of a black ditch, what will be the result when the whole is closeted? And what will be the result when the population is doubled? The remedy proposed is this: a large portion of the water which should constitute the Thames is to be diverted from the centre to the sides, and at the outlet the whole is to be deodorised and converted into manure.

That is to say, the whole fæcal matter of London—a comparatively small bulk—is to be diluted to an enormous amount, polluting millions of gallons of water, as if, in that bulky condition, it can be easier dealt with than in its original small bulk, in order to carry out Mr. Chadwick’s crotchet of getting the sewage highly diluted for the sake of irrigating the land with liquid manure, like the Edinburgh “foul burn,” through glazed pipes; and that, after it is ascertained to be impracticable, and that the deodorised manure must be reduced to the dry condition.

In discussing this question with the most able member of the Metropolitan Board, he remarked to me, that the new sewers are only a remedy for a worse evil, and calculated, at most, for the next twenty-five years, when the increase of the population will defeat their end. If we had to begin de novo, deodorising house by house would be the true method.

Most persons have remarked how beautifully clean the streets of London are after a thunder­storm. This is scavenging by nature. Sewers are, for the most part, a contrivance to defeat this kind of scavenging. By sewers are to be understood deep underground drains, only acces­sible by passing through them. By surface-drains are not necessarily understood open drains, but drains following the natural inequalities of the surface, and which may be provided with covers to render them easy of access.

Storm-waters might thus be carried off and permitted to enter their natural exit, the river, wherever a river exists. There is little in the surface-washings to affect the natural streams.

Everything tending to putrify in the streams should be kept out of them. So also everything tending to clog the channel should be kept out. We do not throw ashes into the river, for this latter reason. Obnoxious matters are produced in dwellings and factories. Factories give refuse such as gas-water, and similar matters, well known as “blue billy,” surreptitiously discharged into the river, and giving out the poisonous gas, sulphuretted hydrogen. Dwellings furnish solid liquid fæcal matter, soapy and other water, containing refuse vegetable matter. Soapy water might without drainage pass into the river as innoxious sewage.

Vegetable water needs deodorising as it passes away, that is, putting into a condition in which it will not give off gases, precisely as is now largely done with the refuse of gas-works. With one exception the chief difficulty is the fæcal matter, and that is as noxious as the gas which permeates the earth below the streets leaking from the pipes, mixing with the sewage, and helping largely to pollute the river.

Gas is passed by pressure through a large extent of cast-iron piping of small dimensions. It has been said that it permeates the metal, but it certainly permeates the joints, and so escapes. The screw threads corroding in the pipes, the vibration of the passing vehicles shakes out the rust, and the gas goes out through the loose earth. This waste—a very heavy per-centage—raises the price of gas proportionately, at the same time that it lessens our supply of light and lowers our health, sometimes killing us outright by explosion or inhaling. The whole under-stratum of the streets and houses is saturated with this waste gas, which is in many ways reconverted into the sulphuretted hydrogen it was before the lime purified it in the process of manufacture. Do we need proof of it? Hang over the street gratings or on an up-turned pavement; watch the black earth surrounding every pipe, probably more noxious than the burnt candle snuff from which the advent of gas freed us.

The obvious remedy for this evil is to cease burying the pipes in loose earth, which only serves as a bad kind of “puddling,” and to prepare accessible channels wherein they can be examined from time to time, and repaired without disturbing the paving, and wherein they need not be taken up or disturbed, or have their joints broken by the vibration of the vehicles. This practice of burying our water and gas and sewage pipes in the ground in inaccessible darkness is an ancient ignorance unpardonable at the present day, involving costly waste and more costly disease.

But the great source of river and drain nuisance is the fæcal matter of our dwellings. This is divisible