disdain to sacrifice professional tradition to
the exigencies of the public health, call such
things necessary; others, who are of different
opinion, they denounce as theorists. Here the
dispute lies, and meanwhile there is Timon's
blessing on the matter in dispute:—
"What is amiss, plague and infection mend!"
So determined is the No Progress party in
its resistance to the labours of men active in
endeavours to promote the public health, that
it appears bent upon crying Nay whenever
they say Yea, and Yea whenever they say
Nay. For example, we have lately had in the
papers evidence of an engineer upon some
street severely attacked by cholera. The
houses wanted drainage, and the fault was all
ascribed to the houseowners. A new sewer
had been formed, but although the owners
along its course had received formal notice of
the fact, only a few had drained their houses
into it. There is an aggravation of evil in such
cases, because it is obvious that a sewer built
to convey away the drainage of a hundred
houses, if it receive sewage matter only from
a score has only a small part of its proper
power, and wants force for the full onward
sweep of its contents. Thereupon, cry the
Commissioners of Sewers, O ye perverse
owners! but the true cry should be, O ye
perverse Commissioners of Sewers! Certain
powers exist for the protection of ratepayers.
The Commissioners may offer to connect any
number of houses with the sewers by house
drains made at once under a common
contract, and to distribute the charges on the
property over a space of thirty years, making
it payable perhaps in the case of a district to
which the Public Health Act is applied, by a
private improvement rate. The
Commissioners have refused to adopt this course.
They only give notice in each case that, a
sewer having been formed, the owners may
connect their house drains with it if they
please. Should any owner beg of them to do
the work on his behalf, or estimate its cost,
he is referred by them to the sewer
contractor or to his own bricklayer. The sewer
contractor or the bricklayer gets for the
separate draining of a house never less than
twice, often three times what it would cost to
drain it as one of a group under a common
contract. Twelve, fifteen, or twenty pounds
will be the charge to a house owner for work
which by the other system might have cost but
six: the payment even of that six being, if
necessary, taken by small instalments spread
over a series of years. Fourteen pounds, cash
down, is a prohibitive tux upon drainage; a
shilling a quarter for a term of years is
something altogether different. The owners of
the poorer class of houses are often lessees
with short terms and short interests in the
premises for which they are allowed the
option of incurring or not incurring an
immediate heavy charge. The high charges therefore
prevent proper work for house drainage
in poor districts from becoming general. But
in these charges the sewers contractors have
an interest. Of one small contractor alone
we know that he has made two thousand
a-year by house drainage jobs. This is the
system maintained, in defiance of the public
interests, by the Metropolitan Sewers
Commission; and maintained in spite of ample
powers to do good, which that Commission,
out of its perversity, refuses to employ.

During the late outbreak of cholera in London,
accusations were made against the
Commissioners of Sewers which were perhaps not
well founded. It was said that they should
not have been engaged in drainage works
during the hot weather, when at the same
time a severe epidemic was abroad. Good
works are never out of season, if they be
discreetly done. All depends upon the
discretion. As managed when left in the hands
of common workmen, drainage works in
summer time are seriously mischievous. Dr.
Rigby, in his evidence before the Health of
Towns Commissioners, has related how such
men working in a common ditch spread the
contents on a bank near a lying-in hospital,
and established in that way an evaporating
surface which led to the sacrifice of many
patients' lives. The late Board of Health
never trusted such workmen unless they were
superintended by a medical officer in all
operations out of which by wrong management
risk could arise. Carefully done drainage
works are of service during an epidemic,
because they give immediate relief by the
clearing of cesspools and removal of
evaporating surfaces. Out of a hundred cases of
death examined at Croydou, three only could
be ascribed to sewering operations, and in
those three cases the cesspool matter, instead
of being removed with due precaution, had
been spread about the premises of the
deceased persons.

The mention of Croydon, which is one of
the war cries in a sanitary quarrel, turns us
aside to the mention of a scheme of drainage
which is said there to have failed, and which
is an attempt—whether successful or not time
will prove—to fulfil the conditions requisite
to the complete efficiency of any sewerage.
What those conditions are we have already
stated, and the public can have no dispute
about them. The question only is, whether
by pipe drainage—so they call the scheme
which is said to have failed at Croydon—these
conditions really are fulfilled. Upon this
question we hold no dogmatical opinions.
Certain materials exist for the formation of a
judgment, which are perhaps insufficient; but
they are more abundant than most people
suppose, and they are not exactly those which
are most commonly forced by combatants on
public notice. Pipe drainage appears to
succeed in many places, while we are being told
only of one or two in which it has been said
to fail. Even of Croydon, the last we heard
was that the builders of additional plots of