few sentences. Coming out from the midst
of all the controversy raised, of late years,
between this system and that—setting aside
all thought of existing propositions for town
drainage, and asking ourselves simply what
we want done, in order that we may have a
well-defined notion of that, before taking
anybody's answer to the question how to do it—
we find certain facts that require only to be
stated to be put beyond dispute. The object
of drainage is to carry off the refuse of a
town. Good drains are those which do carry it
off, and which leave none of it to stagnate and
putrefy under our streets and houses. That
form is best and that material is best for
house-draining and sewers which will allow the
sewage matter to escape from under us with
the most speed and with the least obstruction.
What material, or what form this may be,—
what should be the size of drains,—what
their slope—and how, whether by pumping
or otherwise, the difficulty should be overcome
of draining town land below high-water
mark,—all these are questions for the
engineers to settle. Upon this only the public
has to maintain its unalterable opinion, that
it is the business of the drains to carry off
our refuse matter promptly and efficiently,
so that it may get out of town before it has
had time to putrefy. Surrounded as we are
by monuments of engineering skill, we must
refuse utterly to believe that engineers are
incapable of making town drains able to
perform their work. They are not performing
their work when they are so constructed
that the Chairman of the Metropolitan
Commission of Sewers can unite with his praise
of their excellence the warning, that to trap
them in the street, and so force into houses
the foul gases they contain, would be to breed
another plague of London. Those gases
which would rise in-doors to cause death,
rising out of doors must at least cause
disease. When the City Commission of Sewers
praises the liberality and wisdom of a citizen
who undertakes to carry up the foul air from
the gully-holes in his vicinity, by a tall shaft
built against his premises, we may be sure
that the City sewers are not of the right
construction; because, if they were, no citizen
would lie under the necessity of building
chimneys to convey away the poison that they
breed. When an engineer plans a system
of town drainage, and part of his plan
consists in the building of tall chimneys here
and there, aided by furnaces, to carry up the
poison that is to be bred out of matters
stagnating and rotting in his drains, the public
may at once be sure that he is not the
gentleman by whom the mystery, if mystery it
be, of sound and wholesome drainage has
been fathomed. Drains which, in their first
design, set out with the understanding that
they shall be foul and beget noisome gases,
are not the drains wanted by any
townspeople who value wholesome air. By a proper
adjustment of form, material, and slope in the
sewerage, and by connecting it with a decently
ordered system of water-supply, means can be
found—and if they have not been found or
nearly found already, must be sought—for
the real drainage of towns. We know what
drainage means when it refers to a glass of
wine; we must be determined that it shall
mean as much when it refers to town refuse,
and cry emphatically to our engineers, "No
heeltaps!"

It is the heeltaps in the drainage that
contribute so much to the mortality of London,
and to the sorrows bred by sickness in
town families all over Europe. They helped
to aggravate the cholera, which is but an
occasional scourge after all; they maintain a
constant large mortality by typhus fever,
which abides in the land as a never-ceasing
pestilence; they add to the fatal effect of
other preventible diseases, and convert
harmless maladies, such as a child's scarlet-fever,
into awful and malignant forms. We do not
refer all preventible disease, or any one
disease especially, to a deficient drainage, or
deny that our bad drains are fifty times
better than none. Many monster evils prey
upon health. It happens to be just now our
business to direct attention only to this one;
but we do not mean to forget the rest.

It is a fact familiar enough to every man's
nose that the system of drainage now in
common use does not produce satisfactory
results. Four or five years ago, a survey was
made of the sewerage under London, called
the Subterranean Survey. Things remaining
nearly as they used to be, some sentences
from the reports made during the survey
will be enough to suggest reflections upon
which we shall not dwell. On the Surrey
side of the water, where our London drainage
is in the worst state, it was said that "the
deposit is usually two feet in depth, and in
some cases it amounts to nearly five feet of
putrid matter. The smell is usually of the
most horrible description, the air being so
foul that explosion and choke-damp are very
frequent. On the twelfth of January, we were
very nearly losing a whole party by choke-damp,
the last man being dragged out on his
back (through two feet of black foetid deposit)
in a state of insensibility. Another explosion
took place on the twelfth of February, in the
Peckham and Camberwell Road sewer, and one
on the twenty-first of February, in the
Kennington Road sewer. In both cases, the men
had the skin peeled off their faces and their
hair singed. The sewers on the Surrey side
are very irregular; even when they are
inverted, they frequently have a number of
steps and inclinations the reverse way,—
causing the deposit to accumulate in
elongated cesspools." On the other side of the
water, the surveyors arrived at the following,
among other conclusions: "That much of
the sewerage of the city of Westminster is in
the rotten state, and contains a large amount
of foul deposit; that in the more modern