Plug in a frost.
When society is more perfectly organized than it is at present, and when the great body of the people understand the value of co-operation for procuring advantages that individuals cannot attain, public baths will be established in every town, and in every district of a town. The great Roman people had public baths for all ranks; and remains of their baths still exist in this country. The great British people have only thought within these few years that public baths were a necessity. The establishment of public washhouses, in connexion with baths, having every advantage of machinery and economical arrangements, are real blessings to the few who now use them.
It is little more than thirty years since London was lighted with gas. Pall Mall was thus lighted in 1807, by a chartered company, to whose claims for support the majority of householders were utterly opposed. They had their old oil-lamps, which were thought absolute perfection. The main pipes which convey gas to the London houses are now fifteen hundred miles in length. There are, we believe, nearly a thousand proprietory gas-works in Great Britain. The noblest prospect in the world is London from Hampstead Heath on a bright winter's evening. The stars are shining in heaven, but there are thousands of earthly stars glittering in the city there spread before us: and as we look into any small space of that wondrous illumination, we can trace long lines of light losing themselves in the general splendor of the distance, and we can see dim shapes of mighty buildings afar off, showing their dark masses amidst the glowing atmosphere that hangs over the capital for miles, with the edges of flickering clouds gilded as if they were touched by the first sunlight. This is a spectacle that men look not upon, because it is common; and so we walk amidst the nightly splendours of the Strand, and forget what it was in the middle of the last century—the days of "darkness visible," under the combined efforts of the twinkling lamp, the watchman's lantern, and the vagabond's link.
The last, but in many respects one of the most useful of public works in Great Britain, to which a large amount of capital has been devoted, is the construction of sewers in our cities and towns. Popular intelligence and official power have been very slowly awakened to the performance of this duty. And yet the consequences of neglect have been felt for centuries. In 1290 the monks of White Friars and of Black Friars complained to the king that the exhalations from the Fleet River overcame the pleasant odour of the frankincense which burned on their altars, and occasioned the deaths of the brethren. This was the polluted stream that in time came to be known as Fleet Ditch, which Pope described as
"The king of dykes, than whom no sluice of mud With deeper sable blots the silver flood."
London street-lights, 1760.