All houses should be inspected at regular intervals by officers who are independent of local considerations, and we ought to prevent nuisance and not wait till it becomes so glaring that neighbours are bound to take the unpleasant course of complaining. Under the present system we merely shut the stable door after the horse has been stolen, i.e., we only abate a nuisance after it has done its mischief.

If filth has to be removed from premises by the public authorities, then such removal should be paid for by the owner in the case of weekly tenants, or by the occupier in the case of yearly tenants and leaseholders, or freeholders.

All water-closets should be taxed, because they necessarily leave filth to be dealt with by the public authorities. If charges were equitably levied, then one of two things would happen: either (a), the work of the public authority would dwindle to a minimum; or (b), those who trust to the public authority to keep them clean would pay more than those who keep themselves clean.

The opposite course is too often taken. Compulsory connection with sewers is often insisted upon even in rural places where there is no necessity for such compulsion, and good citizens are often inordinately taxed to cleanse the filthy property of bad citizens.

An equitable adjustment of Sanitary Rates seems to be the first essential for encouraging the individual householder to do his duty. This is more essential now than formerly, because by the Rivers Pollution Act all filth must be cleansed in some way before it is allowed to take its course along the lines of natural drainage to a river.

CHAPTER II.

WATER.

WATER is an article of first necessity to all of us. Without pure water there cannot be health. Pure water has served moralists of all times as a symbol of purity. The Christian Sacrament of Baptism is an instance of this.

Our moral responsibility with regard to water should be to regard its purity as something too sacred to be defiled. In this Christian land, however, there is scarcely a water-course which is not polluted, and many of our loveliest rivers have been wantonly converted into sewers.

In his introduction to "The Crown of Wild Olive," professor Ruskin gives an eloquent description of our swinish and disgraceful apathy with regard to water. The passage is so beautiful, that I make no apology for quoting it in full.

"Twenty years ago there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the source of the Wandle, and including the low moors of Addington, and the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which "giveth rain from heaven;" no pasture ever lightened in spring-time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness-fain hidden-yet full confessed. The place remains (1870) nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I say, that I have never

seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning—not in Pisan Maremma-not by Campagna tomb-not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore-as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect over the delicate sweetness of that English scene. Nor is any

blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through ways of feathery reeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the Chalcedony in Moss-agate, starred here and there with the white Grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes, which, having neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough to dig into the ground, they thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And in a little pool behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentle hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a rugged bank of mortar and scoria, and bricklayers' refuse, on one side, which the clean water, nevertheless, chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond; and then circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-adozen men, with one day's work, could cleanse those pools and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm, and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled only

by angels from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man for evermore, about those wells of English water."

If poetry may be defined as the art of conveying absolute truths in the most beautiful and forcible language attainable, of at once compelling the intellect and gratifying the senses, then the above passage must take a high rank among short English poems, for its beauty is equalled by its absolute matter-of-fact truth.

Unfortunately for the purity of English waters, the Public Health Act of 1848 compelled the emptying of town sewerage into rivers, and we are still taught that one of the chief tenets of our sanitary creed should be to dirty as much water as possible in washing away from our houses filth which ought to be buried. As a consequence of this, pure water is becoming daily more difficult to get, and now-a-days it is considered safer and better to drink water-hard, charged with carbonic acid, and deficient in oxygen-which has been raised at infinite cost from the depths of the earth, than to drink of the "brook which babbles by," with every bubble freshened by the air and charged with its maximum amount of oxygen. The reason for this is that the brook has almost certainly been fouled by receiving the filthiness from dwellings nearer to its source, and the natural consequence is the reflection that if the brook has already been fouled, a little more fouling can do no harm, and thus the brook gathers sewage as it flows, till, having passed through sundry towns in its course, it flows out to sea a murky, lurid, seething, stinking

sewer.

We all of us deplore this state of things, but few of us in thinking of the cause of such filthy impurity ever pause to put to ourselves the solemn question, "Is it I?" We inveigh against the "Board," we say that such a state of things is disgraceful, we shut our eyes to the fact that the disgrace falls upon ourselves as well as others; and even though we may be favourably circumstanced for doing our

duty towards the water-courses, the pangs of conscience are seldom sufficient to make us stop our quota of pollutions; at least to do our own duty, and, doing it, set a good example to others.

Richard the Second (whose advisers probably remembered the epidemics of "the Black Death" in the reign of his grandfather) passed an Act in 1388 which imposed a penalty of twenty pounds (worth how much of our money?) on persons who fouled ditches and rivers with filth and refuse, and in 1876 Parliament passed an act intended to save rivers from pollution. This act is put in force against "Boards" and "Authorities (with how much success, the Thames, the Mersey, and the Clyde will testify), but is seldom enforced against individuals; and although it is often easy for an individual to cease polluting a water-course, it is often impossible for a sanitary authority to do so in the face of the apathy of the individuals by whom the members of the "Board" have been elected.

Not unfrequently the "Board" is content to let the individuals alone, because millions spent in sewers and other millions spent in water-works is "good for trade" in general, and, possibly, specially good for the special trade of some of the members of our Local Parliaments.

The demon of self-interest has always to be reckoned with when devising measures intended to benefit the Public Health.

Among the diseases which are caused or conveyed by impure water are the following:

Those marked with an asterisk are certainly in most cases, and probably in others, conveyed by drinking water previously contaminated by human ordure.

Let us take the commonest of these diseases, typhoid