There were, it was said, “a formidable host of difficulties” as regarded the execution of improved works of house drainage.
There was the opposition of the proprietors on the ground of expense; there were the provisions of the Act of Parliament,[11] which were so intricate as to be almost unintelligible and unworkable; there was the want of a proper outfall for the sewage; and the want of a supply of water to wash away the filth—a possible explanation for the existing state of abomination, but certainly not a justification for the prolonged inaction of successive Parliaments and Governments in allowing affairs to reach so frightful a pass, and for dooming the people to a condition of things which it was entirely beyond their power to remedy even as regarded the single house they inhabited.
Just as everything connected with sewerage and drainage was so placidly neglected, and so fearfully bad, so also was it as regarded another matter of even more vital necessity, namely, the supply of water to the inhabitants of London for drinking, or for domestic, trade, or sanitary purposes.
“Water is essential as an article of food. Water is necessary to personal cleanliness. Water is essential to external cleansing, whether of houses, streets, closets, or sewers.”
Manifestly, the supply of water was not a matter which the individual in a large community such as London could in any way make provision for by his own independent effort. And yet there was no public body in London, central or local, representative or otherwise, charged with the duty of securing to the people even the minimum quantity necessary for life.
Early in the seventeenth century the New River Company was formed for the supply of water to London. And as years went on Parliament evidently considered it fulfilled its obligations in this respect by making over to sundry private companies the right of supplying to the citizens of London this vital requirement, or, as it has been termed, this “life-blood of cities”; and Parliament had done this without even taking any guarantee or security for a proper distribution to the people, or for the purity of the water, or the sufficiency of its supply.
Practically, a generous Parliament had bestowed as a free gift upon these Water Companies the valuable monopoly, so far as London was concerned, of this necessity of life.
Although by the middle of the nineteenth century there was no portion of the metropolis into which the mains and pipes of some of the companies had not been carried, yet, as the companies were under no compulsion to supply it to all houses, large numbers of houses, and particularly those of the poorer classes, received no supply. Indeed, in many parts of London there were whole streets in which not a single house had water laid on to the premises.
In the district supplied by the New River Company, containing about 900,000 persons, about one-third of the population were unsupplied; and in the very much smaller area of the Southwark Company’s district about 30,000 persons had no supply.