breathe the air of the bridges with pleasure,
and save the Seine from becoming a
loathsome stream.*
* See Household Words, Number 433, page 79.

In returning from the theatre in Paris,
after midnight, to your hôtel garni, or
furnished apartments, in the Faubourg, you will
encounter long files of one-horse vehicles,—
large casks suspended on a pair of wheels,—
of whose unsavoury contents you soon become
aware. You have no right to complain that
the breeze which sweeps past them has not
the fragrance of a vineyard or a bean-field, if
you choose to keep unreasonable hours. As
to the nuisance to the town, the shops are all
shut; as to the townsfolk, they are almost
all in bed; for Paris, less free than London,
is not allowed to keep open house all night.
When the hour strikes, the bakers, the
charcutiers or ham and sausage sellers, and
the wine shops, must close their shutters and
turn their customers out of doors.
Consequently the few small hours of the night are
made available for the transport of matters
which could not be decently transported by
day. At midnight, the sanitary procession
begins. With us, in London, the burden of
the highly-scented caravan would simply be
allowed to flow into the river, becoming not
only a nuisance, but a loss to the community:
in the Faubourgs of Paris, they are thus
made to fertilise the market gardens of the
environs. The barren uplands of Saint Denis
and Montmartre are rendered productive.
The city has an increased return of
vegetables, fruits, and flowers; the city, too, can
fearlessly lounge leaning over the parapet
wall of the handsome quays, without holding
a pocket-handkerchief to the city's nose.

It is a very short-sighted and ignorant
mistake to suppose that all which congregated
human beings need do, is simply to get
rid of their rejectamenta. The object must
be to get rid of them usefully, to turn them
to account, to utilise them, or the whole
machinery of agricultural and horticultural
production and reproduction must stop.
Supposing that we could utterly annihilate,
or send off to the moon, all the thrown-out
materials from our persons, our dwellings,
and our gardens, together with those from
our domestic animals—everything, in short,
which a town must remove from within its
circumscribing boundary;—supposing that
we were able to effect this for several
successive centuries, what would be the result?
For several centuries, perhaps, we might
remain excessively clean, congratulating
ourselves on our scrupulous nicety; and then
would follow utter sterility, famine, and the
death of the human race and their dependents.
There would not remain even grass
for us to eat; because grass, to be good
for anything as nutriment, must itself be
nourished and fattened up by fertilising
atoms which have already served in the
frame of some previous living organism. The
physical circle whose laws we are compelled
to obey, whether we like them or not, is a
never-ending round of absorption, digestion,
assimilation, and rejection; of birth, growth,
increase, life, death, decomposition, and
dispersion; and then of life and growth again.
In a speech by Lord Erskine, at one of the
Holkham sheep-shearings, years ago, there is
a fine passage in illustration of the wisdom of
Providence, who, by the very offensiveness of
certain substances, compels man to bury
them beneath the soil, and so to increase the
soil's fertility; the operation necessary for
the wholesome existence of individuals is
the identical process by which the largest
amount of food is obtainable. London does
not think fit to hide her offscourings in the
earth; she prefers to see and smell them
floating past her (and sometimes back again)
in the river.

Happily for our posterity, we cannot
annihilate human or any other offal. Neither
ought we to make it an infliction and a pest
on any other portion of the community, or on
any other portion of the globe. Gravesend
may well raise up her hands in terror, if
there is to be excavated on the opposite shore
an abyss, compared with whose emanations
the sulphurous odours of the Stygian lake
are as the perfumes of an orange-grove. Or,
failing that, a vast iron tube is to conduct
the united cloacæ of London right out into
the North Sea, or even as far as the coast of
Norway. Will other nations quietly permit
the projected infection of the North Sea, now
a rich fishing-ground and a valuable training
school for the sailors of France, Holland, and
Denmark? We receive a large supply of
lobsters and turbot from Norway. If the
iron tube disgorges itself thereabouts, who
would henceforth eat Norway lobsters,
supposing that any should remain to be eaten?

The settlement of the London sewage
question (at length resolved by parliament,
let us hope) has been considerably delayed by
the squabbles and discussions, the hagglings
and the bargainings, of certain scientific
agriculturists, who maintain that sewage waters
are valueless as manure, and cannot
consequently be estimated at money's worth; as a
further consequence, that those who undertake
to relieve a town of them, ought to have
them for nothing. It is the sort of delay and
holding back, for the sake of a reduction of
price, which is apt to take place in all great
sales and contracts. Meanwhile, things do
not rest as they were, but get from bad to
worse; and between this and Christmas, the
population of London may be decimated,
unless a summer flood comes to our relief, by
sweeping the river's bed by an inundating
flush, sent down by excessive rain on the
uplands. But the position taken up by those
theorists is extraordinary, and is opposed to
the history and experience of all other
agricultural countries. True, river-mud and