M. Piorry, a French writer on dwellings, says
that " however intense may be the smell
arising from cesspools, it is only disagreeable
and not directly injurious." Let us take a
French answer to this staggering statement
from M. Ruige Delorme. He informs us that
in Paris, at the Bank, there used to be in the
porter's chamber a small crevice in the tube
leading to the cesspool. The smell in this room
was insufferable. The porter died, and no
one could assign the cause of his death. Eight
months afterwards, the tube not having been
repaired, a second porter died in the same
mysterious way. M. d'Arcet discovered,
however, that the fissure was the cause of
both the deaths, and gave the necessary
cautions. Nothing was done. M. d'Arcet
had distinctly stated that if nothing were
done, the next tenant of the room would also
perish. Nothing was done and the next
porter did perish.

Horrible neglect, no doubt; horrible apathy.
Yet it was only a single porter, says some
one, perhaps. Aye, but ten thousand people
die yearly in London alone, much in the same
way. And we accept with apathy our zymotic
diseases—nearly all preventible afflictions of
this kind—though there occur in England
and Wales a hundred thousand annually.
They are accepted even with more apathy,
it is fair to own, in Paris than in London;
for, our neighbours are not ill-content to
be told in the weekly reports that "diseases
of the zymotic class are not above the
average." To go back to the parallel with
which we started, the apathetic reception of
such a fact—and we assume it with sufficient
nonchalance on this side of the Channel—
resembles a state of quiet satisfaction in
such intelligence as, that "There were two
hundred and fifty cases of baking to death
returned last week; but, allowing for the
increase of the population, this is not above the
average. Of these cases, the majority were
young persons; only one hundred of those
who have been baked, were above fifteen years
of age." If Typhus were a murderer, and
we could lock him up, should we put his
murders into the weekly bill of mortality and
leave him loose as an accepted fact? He is
a murderer, and we can lock him up.
Dogberry and Verges are discussing how to set
about it.

There is a lake of filth under London, large
enough to swallow the whole population.
There need be no cesspools; there need be no
house-drains, or sewers, containing a corrupt
deposit, under any part of the metropolis.
Even in very common and roughly made clay
pipes, as compared with the best brick sewers,
the rapidity of flow and power of sweep for
a drainage is one third greater. Large brick
sewers have been opened, through which the
diffused flow of a small stream of house sewage
has trickled over stagnant deposit, and they
have been found to be simply elongated
cesspools. Inside such sewers, pipes have been
laid down to do their work,having the same
inclination and the same runs of water;
through such pipes, the stream has been
found to flow with a velocity that has kept
everything clear. It has been found that
the smallest tubular house-drains—which
have, in proportion to the flow of water, the
most friction—are kept free from deposit
without flushing. It is quite certain, therefore,
that the larger mains, when duly adapted
in form, size, material, and inclination, for
the work they have to do, with less friction
and more water-power, will remain clear
without artificial help. Old engineers, some
of them men of note, hold an entrenched
position in their capacious old brick sewers;
but the pipe drainage proves itself, in every fair
trial, not only cheaper, but a good deal more
effective, than the old system of drains and
sewers of deposit. Where a district is a dead
flat, or below high-water mark, so that no
natural fall assists what may be called the natural
system of drainage, the fall can be made
artificially at a comparatively small expense, and
the drainage at last lifted by steam-power,
which enables us to raise eighty thousand
gallons a hundred feet high for a shilling.

The poisonous effluvium that rises from
the openings of our old-fashioned sewers is
not the result of immediate decomposition,
but of a decay which is found to be established
about four days after the discharge of
the decaying matter from the house-drains.
The rate at which the sewage matter travels
through pipe drains and sewers, is about three
miles an hour; it could therefore all pass
from under the metropolis before the stage
of poisonous decomposition begins.

There are, under London, about a thousand
miles of sewer, formed upon no common
system, in which floats the poison ready to
ascend by any outlet. During the years
1849, 1850, and 1851, however, there have
also been laid down about fifty miles of pipe-
sewer, and upwards of a hundred and fifty
miles of pipe drain, which work in a wholesome
way and cost no money for cleansing.
Upwards of eighteen thousand houses have
been pipe-drained, chiefly by private enterprise.
The expense of cleansing the old brick
sewers under the metropolis, has varied
between seventeen thousand five hundred and
eighteen thousand five hundred pounds a
year.

What conflict of interests, what vestry
oratory, what heart-burnings between old
school engineers and young school engineers,
what clashing of boards, and jealousies of
superseded men, and mountains upon mountains
of controversial nonsense, would make up
my tedious tale, if I endeavoured to narrate
how the allied wants of a high-pressure water
supply and a pure system of pipe drainage have
fared amid the din of London. One month, we
are to have a clean Thames and a long tunnel;
in another month, we are to be piped throughout
and are told, not without some truth,