district of Belgrave and Eaton Squares,
although the brickwork of the sewers is
generally sound and good, they contain several
faulty places, and abound with noxious matter,
—in many cases stopping up the house-drains,
and smelling horribly; that in the district of
Grosvenor, Hanover, and Berkeley Squares,
as a rule, considerable deposit is found in the
sewers, emitting much effluvia; that the same
remark may be made of the sewers in the
neighbourhood of Clare Market, Covent Garden,
Soho Square and Fitzroy Square; that
much of the work north of Oxford Street,
about Cavendish, Bryanstone, Manchester,
and Portman Squares, is in such a state of
rottenness and decay, that there is no security
for its standing from day to day; that there
is a large amount of the most loathsome
deposit in these sewers,—but the act of flushing
might bring some of them down altogether;
that even throughout the new Paddington
district, the neighbourhood of Hyde Park
Gardens, and the costly squares and streets
adjacent, the sewers abound with the foulest
deposit, from which the most disgusting
effluvium arises." It arises through the
gully-holes, as we all know, into the streets,
and it arises through the lesser drains into
the houses. It enters our lungs and eats our
lives away. After such a glimpse into the
subterranean world, we are not slow to
believe the Chairman of the Metropolitan
Sewers Commission, when he tells us that if
the sewers—which he declares to be so sweet
—were not allowed to exhale their poison
into the street, they would puff it up into our
houses, and so breed a pestilence as horrible
as the Great Plague.

It is a choice of evils we are told, and so it
is. It is an offer to us of neat poison, or of
poison mixed freely with air. We choose to
have what is not at present offered to us—a
drainage that shall beget no poison at all.
There ean be no doubt that they are right
who warn the public against trapping gully-holes.
A great many letters were
addressed to the newspapers upon this subject,
during the recent outbreak of cholera; and
it is evident that there exists in the public
mind a good deal of misapprehension about
trapping. Perfect trapping, to begin with, is
in any case almost impossible. Siphon-traps,
closed by water, are opened by the evaporation
of the water in hot weather, precisely
when we wish for the protection they afford;
flap-traps seldom close accurately,—the best
of them can be untrapped by a straw. The
closing of the holes that allow access of cold
air into the drains hastens decomposition,
and intensifies the deadliuess of all its
products. As they are developed, they increase
their pressure on the walls, by which they
are restrained; they force a way through
even the best traps, and they gush up through
house-drains into the houses—that to use the
comparison made by Mr. Simon, the excellent
officer of heallh for the City—are placed over
them, as a bell-glass may be placed over the
neck of a retort.

Here we stop to remark upon a strange
argument used by one of the ingenious
authors of the engineers' report to the
Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers. In a
report intended to appease in some measure
the public wrath against bad sewerage, it was
urged that in districts accused of fatally bad
drainage, investigation proved that the deaths
could have had no connexion with the drains,
because most of them were found to have
occurred in uppermost rooms. Of course we
must guard ourselves always, against fixing
our attention too much on one thing. The
lodgers in uppermost rooms—garrets—are
the poorest and most wretched; they suffer
the most privation; and, having to carry their
water up and down many steps, they are the
least likely to be clean. But it is also precisely
in the uppermost rooms that the drain-poison
would accumulate. It would rise from below
and be carried by the draught up the great
shaft of the staircase, which has been called
the aerial sewer of a house, until it would be
stopped by the roof and collected in the upper
chambers. In a large house, on a roasting or
a washing day, meat or soapsuds will be smelt
very distinctly in the attics, though there
may be but little trace of either in the lower
bed-rooms, drawing-rooms, or parlours. Deaths
among lodgers in uppermost rooms would
therefore be the likely, and not, as the
engineer supposed, the unlikely consequences,
of foul drains. ,

If the sewerage—meaning of course the
existing system of sewerage—were sealed up
both in house and street, sewers could be
entered only upon penalty of instant death.
Since in that cade they never could be
cleansed, occasional underground explosions,
and a horrible accumulation of deposit
would soon put an end to the whole system.
But the gases would not remain long pent
up. The sewers near Westminster Hall
were once very effectually trapped. The
consequence was that the atmosphere within them
came to be found intolerable by the rats, and
the rats worked their way towards a better
air in the direction of the New Courts of
Justice which Dr. Reid was then engaged in
ventilating. Thus, it soon happened that the
more vigorously the doctor pumped, the more
plentifully did he suck up foul smells through
the rat-holes, and at last, one of the judges
being seconded with much emphasis by the
bar, in declaring that "he preferred God's air
to Dr. Reid's," the unlucky doctor fell himself
into bad odour among men of law. It was
not until long aftersvards that the cause of
this annoyance was discovered; and the doctor
never could persuade the lawyers to allow,
upon fresh evidence, a second hearing and
reversal of the judgment in his case.

We have dwelt thus far upon matters
quite beyond the pale of controversy: upon
evils which no party denies. Engineers who