not all the isolated sellers of and builder's
upon land be instructed how to fit their
properties in the best way together ? Then
there is a Building Act which seems to
have been suffered, by the complaisance
of surveyors, to drop into abeyance; although
a new and effectual law is, we
learn, being framed. The idea of building
solid structures up into the air, securing at
the same time broad thoroughfares and
ample lodging-room of the best kind; the
renting of ample floors by those who now get
for any sum under forty pounds a year
but a rickety crib of a house, are notions
which must in due time take a foremost
place in all discussion about the perfecting
of London.

Our most pressing concern, however, as
citizens, for the next few years will be with
water supply and drainage. There must be
a constant supply of good water at high
pressure within reach of every housewife's
thumb. Every family must have its own
tap, a never-failing source of water that the
most fastidious man may drink without the
intervention of a filter. How to provide it,
is the problem to be now solved. The
deceased Board of Health worked at it, and
pronounced it solved. Whether it be solved
properly or not I am incompetent to say. The
whole question stands over for full discussion,
and it must be settled.

The other subject is one about which it is
right for every Londoner to think. The late
outbreak of cholera in St. Anne's district,
which over a small space of ground re-
enacted the most horrible scenes of pestilence
as it was in the good old times, seems
to have been traced very distinctly to foul
sewers and reeking gully-holes. A sound
and sensible medical man, among others,
gave witness that he had stood by one
such gully-hole, and feeling oppressed by
the stench of it, turned away. He noticed
that its vapours rose before the windows of a
surgeon. Within twenty-four hours that
surgeon was dead. Six persons died in the
house nearest to this sewer opening, on the
opposite side of the way. The landlord of
the house last mentioned, a poor man, complained,
as he said, to the Commissioners of
Sewers, and when he asked that the hole
might be trapped, had been told by them
that he could trap it himself at his own
expense. There may be misconception
about that part of the story; but it is
enough for us to feel that our sewers of
deposit and our cesspools are assuredly the
death of thousands of us.

Now there was a plan of town-drainage
suggested by the old Board of Health which,
if a practicable plan, would exempt us from
all dangers of this kind, besides saving us in
cost of construction eightpence or ninepence
out of every shilling; and that is no slight
consideration when ten millions of pounds are
threatened us by engineers as the estimated
price of a magnificent system for the drainage
of London with grand Roman cloacæ, and
other rude but costly works, which it is just
possible that improved intelligence may have
a way of superseding by some system, much
better and (as commonly occurs in the case
of all such improvements) infinitely cheaper.
The Romans tired their backs in piling
together miles of massive aqueduct, and
crossed deep valleys with gigantic engineering
works—capital things for the gentlemen
concerned in creating them. Titanic aqueducts
are rarely ordered in these days; so far as
water supply goes, we know the use of pipes.
Taking care to use the right bore in each
given case, could we not use pipes for town
drainage? That was the question put for
study and experiment by the late Board of
Health. The members of that board have
been well abused by gentlemen who felt
aggrieved at such treason against
engineering interest; but, in London alone,
three hundred and forty-six miles of pipe-
drainage are now in action, while engineers of
note are still declaring, and a large part of
the public is believing, that sewage matter
will not run through pipes—which seems curious.

When I reason upon any plan and find it
theoretically sound—when I see it tried very
abundantly and, barring an unusually small
amount of the accident and failure that
attends all first experiments, successful—
when. I hear, on the other hand, only the
dictum of learned men accustomed to do
things in other ways, declaring, upon the
authority of nothing but their high reputation,
that the thing in the way in which it
is actually being done cannot be done— I will
not bow to words that are no more than
words, but will accept a proven fact on
its own merits. A properly constructed
system of pipe-drainage, through which all
matter reaches its outlet before it has had
time to decompose, costs, at the very costliest,
one third of what we pay for a grand system
of subterranean catacombs: along the floors of
which filth oozes and stagnates, and from
which it rises, transformed into effluvium, as
that well-known blast of death—" the smell
of the drains." It is this last system which is
now being maintained against innovators. We
are to have London drained—if the public will
not inform itself upon the subject and speak
on its own behalf upon the fine old system
which set out recently with the Victoria Sewer
—one mile long—estimated cost, thirteen
thousand eight hundred and fifty-four pounds;
real cost, as per return, after construction,
twenty-eight thousand pounds; including a few
items omitted from that account, thirty-three
thousand pounds! This fine work, finished but
the other day, is now in such a state of ruin that
fifteen thousand pounds is reported to be the
sum necessary for putting it into proper condition.
All this, for a huge nuisance less than
a mile long; whereas, the money spent upon