manifested. The chairman of the same board, at a
recent sitting—and that, too, in the midst of the
cholera season—undertook also to be facetious.
He recommended people, who complained of
the smell from gully-holes, to—get out of their
way! He urged, as infallibly correct, the
report of the engineer employed by the
commission, that the sewers were quite wholesome;
medical men, he said, had been
frequently invited to go in and satisfy
themselves, but never did. He, Mr. Chairman,
did'nt wonder at that; he should'nt himself
like to go into a sewer. They had able
engineers whose report was entitled to their
perfect confidence. They proved the sewers
to be in a wholesome state. Some people
asked to have gully-holes trapped. But let
them take warning. If they trapped the holes
in the streets, noxious matter would be forced
into the houses, and there would be such a
pestilence as never had occurred since the
great plague of London. Another plague of
London, we were thus told, could arise out of
these perfectly wholesome sewers! In that
way, between the maintaining of a fiction that
all is right in the teeth of a consciousness
that all is wrong, the Metropolitan
Commissioners of Sewers discourse, periodically, the
most astounding nonsense. These gentlemen,
in fact, who have charge of one of the most
important administrations in connection with
the public health, can be regarded only as
avowed opponents of all sanitary progress.
They point to the healthiness of men who go
into sewers just as the supporters of the old
infected jails pointed to jolly jailors, or as the
protectors of intramural churchyards talk
sometimes of the longevity of sextons.

In London, too, we are under the authority
of water-companies who give us bad water in
a bad way, and ask for it a price greater than
would be the cost of a good article. We are
entirely in their hands at present. For
example, the subjects or slaves of the
Hampstead waterwork dynasty must get what they
can in their cisterns on three days a week, and
make the Friday's allowance last, if they can,
until Monday. They must give up all idea of
the necessity of free and copious ablution, or,
if two or three in one household use a bath,
they must all be content to leave the house
unscoured. There is no remedy. Under the
Hampstead dynasty, established very long
ago—in the time, we believe, of King Henry
the Eighth—one is bound to submit to Hamp-
stead laws. If the whole population rose in a
mass to beg its rulers for a little water on a
Saturday, it could put no compulsion on those
water kings. Each company has its own
laws. Some exercise a milder sway than
others; but the rule of each is so absolute,
that it behoves any man looking for a house
in the metropolis to take heed into what sort
of slavery he goes. And a feeble government,
always looking out for a miserable vote
in the House of Commons, smirks at these
water companies.

Here, then, is another part of the great
home question, nearly concerning our
comfort in the bedroom, our refreshment at the
table, our cleanliness in dress and dwelling,
lying, so far as London is concerned, unsolved.
Of course there are engineers, whose interest
it is to maintain existing water companies,
ready enough to pronounce their intentions
nobly disinterested, and their water nectar.
Such an engineer wrote to the Times the
other day in defence of the existing water
kings; and, as was natural, at the same time
in the interests of dirt. It did not concern
us in the least, he was of opinion, what water
we drank. We had no business with it
but to swallow it. He poured out his
wrath against the late Board of Health, the
present Board of Health, and the Registrar-
General—which, in the war against disease, are
certainly the three very best helpers that the
public hitherto has had; and he went out of
his way to make an attack upon pipe drainage
in relation among other things to the cholera
at Dartford, from which town another
surveyor writes to say that there is not a house
in it with pipe sewers, and that it has been
particularly free from the late epidemic. We
doubt whether the public knows to how large
an extent attempts—not unsuccessful—have
been made to deaden its perception of its
own best interests by random statements of
this kind. We must be on our guard against
them; and, to avoid being misled must take
some pains to obtain precise information for
ourselves. The slight illustration we have
given of the flippancy with which questions
of public health are discussed by the
Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers, may, for
example, put us on our guard against the
too hasty assent to opinions expressed by
gentlemen connected with that body. But we
shall take an early opportunity of showing
infinitely stronger reasons for distrusting
them.

In this paper it has been our only business
to point out that the public health is cared
for, insufficiently, by public bodies who have
power to act for its interests. The only
public body that might act with vigour is
exceedingly restricted in its power. We have
just passed through a period of domestic
calamity, causing beyond all measure more
private affliction to us than the Russian war.
There is caused every year more household
grief among us by preventable deaths than
could arise out of a dozen wars all waged
together. A long series of epidemics, an
annual sacrifice of many thousand lives, will
continue to bring desolation to our homes
until there shall set in against do-nothing
bodies and obstructive boards a strong
current of that public opinion by which alone
any great question in this country can be
fairly set afloat. Measures essential to the
public health necessarily entail the necessity
of changes in existing systems, against which
existing interests band themselves strongly.