Chapter 7 The Water Party.

Water rains from heaven, and leaps out of the earth; it rolls about the land in rivers, it accumulates in lakes; three-fourths of the whole surface of the globe is water; yet there are men unable to be clean. "God loveth the clean," said Mahomet. He was a sanitary reformer; he was a notorious impostor; and it is our duty to resist any insidious attempt to introduce his doctrines.

There are in London districts of filth which speak to us-through the nose-in an emphatic manner. Their foul air is an atmosphere of charity; for we pass through it pitying the poor. Burke said of a certain miser to whom an estate was left, "that now, it was to be hoped, he would set up a pocket-handkerchief." We hope, of the miserable, that when they come into their property they may be able to afford themselves a little lavender and musk. We might be willing to subscribe for the correction now and then, with aromatic cachou, of the town's bad breath; but water is a vulgar sort of thing, and of vulgarity the less we have the better.

In truth, we have not much of it. We are told that in a great city Water is maid of all work; has to assist our manufactures, to supply daily our saucepans and our tea-kettles; has to cleanse our clothes, our persons, and our houses; to provide baths, to wash our streets, and to flood away the daily refuse of the people, with their slaughter-houses, markets, hospitals, &c. Our dozen reservoirs in London yield a supply daily averaging thirty gallons to each head-which goes partly to make swamps, partly to waste, partly to rot, as it is used in tubs or cisterns. Rome in her pride used once to supply water at the rate of more than three hundred gallons daily to each citizen. That was excess. In London half a million of people get no water at all into their houses; but as those people live in the back settlements, and keep out of our sight, their dirt is no great matter of concern. We, for our own parts, have enough to cook with, have whereof to drink, wherewith to wash our feet sometimes, to wet our fingers and the corner of a towel-we inquire no further. Drainage and all such topics involve details positively nasty, and we blush for any of our fellow-citizens who take delight in chattering about them.

We are told to regard the habits of an infant world. London, the brain of a vast empire, is advised now to forget her civilization, and to go back some thousand years. We are to look at Persian aqueducts, attributed to Noah's great-grandson-at Carthaginians, Etruscans, Mexicans-at what Rome did. It frets us when we are thus driven to an obvious reply. Man in an unripe and half-civilized condition, has not found out the vulgarity of water; for his brutish instinct is not overcome. All savages believe that water is essential to their life and desire it in unlimited abundance. Cultivation teaches us another life, in which our animal existence neither gets nor merits much attention. As for the Romans, so perpetually quoted, it was a freak of theirs to do things massively. While they were yet almost barbarians, they built that Cloaca through which afterward Agrippa sailed down to the Tiber in a boat. Who wishes to see His Worship the Lord Mayor of London emerging in his state barge from a London sewer?

Now here is inconsistency. Thirty million gallons of corruption are added daily by our London sewers to the Thames: that is one object of complaint, good in itself, because we drink Thames water. But in the next breath it is complained that a good many million gallons more should be poured out; that there are three hundred thousand cesspools more to be washed up; that as much filth as would make a lake six feet in depth, a mile long, and a thousand feet across, lies under London stagnant; and they would wish this also to be swept into the river. I heard lately of a gentleman who is tormented with the constant fancy that he has a scorpion down his back. He asks every neighbor to put in his hand and fetch it out, but no amount of fetching out ever relieves him. That is a national delusion. Our enlightened public is much troubled with such scorpions. Sanitary writers are infested with them.

They also say, That in one-half of London people drink Thames water; and in the other half, get water from the Chadwell spring and River Lea. That the River Lea, for twenty miles, flows through a densely-peopled district. and is, in its passage, drenched with refuse matter from the population on its banks. That there is added to Thames water the waste of two hundred and twenty cities, towns, and villages; and that between Richmond and Waterloo-bridge more than two hundred sewers discharge into it their fetid matter. That the washing to and fro of tide secures the arrival of a large portion of filth from below Westminster, at Hammersmith; effects a perfect mixture, which is still farther facilitated by the splashing of the steamboats. Mr. Hassal has published engravings of the microscopic aspect of water taken from companies which suck the river up at widely-separated stages of its course through town-so tested, one drop differs little from another in the degree of its impurity. They tell us that two companies-the Lambeth and West Middlesex-supply Thames Mixture to subscribers as it comes to them; but that others filter more or less. They say that filtering can expurge nothing but mechanical impurities, while the dissolved pollution which no filter can extract is that part which communicates disease. We know this; well, and what then? There are absurdities so lifted above ridicule, that Momus himself would spoil part of the fun if he attempted to trangress beyond a naked statement of them. What do the members of [pg 611] this Water Party want? I'll tell you what I verily believe they are insane enough to look for.

They would, if possible, forsake Thames water, calling it dirty, saying it is hard. So hard they say it is, that it requires three spoonfuls of tea instead of two in every man's pot, two pounds of soap for one in every man's kitchen. So they would fetch soft water from a Gathering Ground in Surrey, adopting an example set in Lancashire; from rain-fall on the heaths between Bagshot and Farnham, and from tributaries of the River Wey, they would collect water in covered reservoirs, and bring it by A covered Aqueduct to London. In London, they would totally abolish cisterns, and all intermittence of supply. Water in London they would have to be, as at Nottingham, accessible in all rooms at all times. They would have water, at high pressure, climbing about every house in every court and alley. They would place water, so to speak, at the finger's end, limiting no household as to quantity. They would enable every man to bathe. They would revolutionize the sewer-system, and have the town washed daily, like a good Mahometan, clean to the finger-nails. They hint that all this might not even be expensive; that the cost of disease and degradation is so much greater than the cost of health and self-respect, as to pay back, possibly, our outlay, and then yield a profit to the nation. They say that, even if it were a money loss, it would be moral gain; and they ask whether we have not spent millions, ere now, upon less harmless commodities than water?

An ingenious fellow had a fiddle-all, he said, made out of his own head; and wood enough was left to make another. He must have been a sanitary man; his fiddle was a crotchet. Still farther to illustrate their own capacity of fiddle-making, these good but misguided people have been rooting up some horrible statistics of the filth and wretchedness which our back-windows overlook, with strange facts anent fever, pestilence, and the communication of disease. All this I purposely suppress; it is peculiarly disagreeable. Delicate health we like, and will learn gladly how to obtain it; but results we are content with, and can spare the details, when those details bring us into contact, even upon paper, with the squalid classes.

If these outcries of the Water Party move the public to a thirst for change, it would be prudent for us ?gritudinary men not rashly to swim against the current. Let us adopt a middle course, a patronizing tone. It is in our favor that a large number of the facts which these our foes have to produce, are, by a great deal too startling to get easy credit. A single Pooh! has in it more semblance of reason than a page of facts, when revelations of neglected hygiene are on the carpet. If the case of the Sanitary Reformers had been only half as well made out, it would be twice as well supported.