millions and a half of people, with the rainflow
always oozing from the district they must
necessarily occupy. The drainage area may be stated
roughly as one hundred and fifty square miles;
and the whole of the works, according to the
original promise, are to be completed in 1863.

The two main principles at the bottom of this
great plan, are to relieve certain low districts
from the nuisances inflicted on them by certain
high districts, and to save the Thames within the
metropolitan boundary, even if the outskirts
persist in defiling it, from being made the great
cesspool of London. The London water companies,
some by act of parliament and others by choice,
no longer make this London cesspool their feeding
cistern, but have gone higher up the stream
for their supply of water, while the sewer-lords
are preparing to take the sewage lower down the
channel. This seems to be a sensible divorce. The
new system of drainage represents the struggle
of art against nature; and if it prove successful,
the almanacks will no longer be able to register
the dates of high-sewage at London-bridge.

The sewerage scheme now being carried out is
so vast, that it has naturally driven many
persons almost demented who have grappled with it
and opposed it. Some people cannot be brought
to believe that any tunnels have been
constructed anywhere; and they look upon the
thick-ribbed shored-cuttings, the houses on
wheels, and the excavators' spades and lanterns,
scattered about in different parts of London, as
mere surface decoys, set up to satisfy a few
inquisitive rate-payers. Others, regard the tunnels
as only too real and substantial; volcanoes of
filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to
explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul
gas, and to poison all whom they fail to smother.
Others, take the financial ground that the scheme
will exhaust three millions sterling, without
doing three-pennyworth of good; forgetting that
the tunnels may always be worth their money
as wine-cellars, bowling-alleys, skittle-grounds,
flower-beds of romance, and fancy subways.

ON THE CIVIL WAR NOW RAGING IN ENGLAND.

No drums tattooing or fifes piping in the
streets; no fathers disinheriting their sons for
taking cross views concerning King and
Commons; no brothers sworn under opposite
standards, and giving their rifles a sharper ring for the
sake of the bad blood flowing between them; no
calling to arms of all faithful citizens on the one
side, and of all loyal subjects on the other; no night
attacks with a turn-out in knitted tassels or
gay-coloured bandanas; no bivouacs on Hampstead
Heath or Wormwood Scrubs; no sign or show or
appurtenance of war; and yet there is civil war
in England—war to the death, if not to the knife
—and every member of society is one of the
warriors. There is civil war between all classes,
and between the various members of each class:
war for place in this overcrowded beehive of
ours, where broad shoulders and well-squared
elbows are blessings of great price; war of
appearances, where all men and women try to look
something better than they are, and the rule is for
the wren to borrow the peacock's plumes; war
between masters and servants, capital and labour,
the orthodox and the heterodox, the conventional
and the unconventional; there is war between
the West and the East, fashion and vulgarity,
velvet and rags; between the club and the
boudoir, the mother of many daughters, and the
bachelor of independent means; between the
maiden still unsettled, and the young wife with
a handsome provision; there is war everywhere
and with every one; and not the most peaceable
can escape out of the field, or refuse to wear
one of the many colours floating about, as
symbols of the party belonging. Even in the still
quiet of the laboratory, and the hushed mysteries
of the dissecting chamber, burst out every now
and then loud notes of war, and philosophers
and men of science fight like meaner mortals for
the maintenance of some spiritual theory which
no one can prove, or the establishment of some
hypothesis of no good to living being even when
established. As many hard knocks have been
given over a few dry bones, or the exact position
of a square piece of water, which no one
has seen, and every one describes—whereby he
contradicts his neighbour and fires a shot into
his citadel—as over the most notoriously exciting
causes of dispute and social turmoil. Decidedly
the philosophers are no wiser than the lower
herd; and science has its war-list as well as its
band of martyrs.

The women, Heaven bless them! are the fiercest
of all the "braves" out in the fields and trenches,
and carry on the war with a vigour unknown to
the sterner sex. What is there but civil war
between the rival ladies of suburban villas, when
the one on the right has two bonnets in the season,
and the one on the left has but one bonnet in the
season? or, when the husband of the one indulges
her with the Highlands or the Alps, and the
husband of the other allows only the sea at
Margate? Do you think that fair ladies know
only how to pipe pastorals like Chloe and
Amaryllis? Or tnat deadly passions never rage
between the closest sisters in soul, and on no
more hostile grounds either than a superiority in
jam-pots, or the items of a milliner's bill? On
the contrary, the civil war which vexes the inner
heart of society has its choicest arsenals in the
breasts of our finest ladies, and dearest female
friends. And what martial passions can compare
with those which fire the souls of the younger
ladies of the suburban villas aforesaid, when the
eligible young man of their society meanders
through their ranks, making a feint of selecting,
now right, now left, now the blonde in ringlets,
now the brunette in braids, for his domestic
lieutenant? Waterloo was a trifle to the
unspoken combat between the forces, and Solferino
was child's play. Of all forms of civil war
commend me to that which fires a large circle of
unmarried girls where brothers are scarce, and
brothers' friends still scarcer, where all their
dispositions are equally affectionate, and the
proper objects for their affection equally rare.