All who have given impartial consideration to the subject seem to concur as to the advantages which result from a control over the supply and distribution of water being possessed by those who are responsible for the drainage and cleanliness of a district. These different duties are in such essential relation to each other that they would seem almost of necessity to require a single direction and control. House-drainage pre-supposes water-supply; water-supply pre-supposes house-drainage; the efficiency of either implies their mutual adaptation; just as the circulation of blood within an animal body implies uninterrupted continuity of arteries and veins, each harmonising with the uses of the other, to ensure the efficiency of the whole. But while the works of drainage executed under your orders lose much of their sanitary usefulness for want of an effectual water-supply, your Hon. Court has no power of interference in the matter, closely associated as it is with the performance of your other functions. These anomalies would be removed, and a most beneficial power over the distribution of water would be vested in the hands of your Commission, if in the renewal of your Act of Parliament you procured authority to represent the citizens in this matter. All the advantages which could possibly be gained by competition, together with many benefits which no competition could ensure, would thus be realised to the population under your charge; if, namely, a clause were inserted in your Bill, empowering you, at your discretion, to contract corporately with any person or any company for the supply of water to the City of London.
In the Public Health Act (passed simultaneously with yours) an enactment of this nature exists, authorising local boards of health to ‘provide their district with such a supply of water as may be proper and sufficient,’ and for this purpose ‘to contract with any person whomsoever to do and execute all such works, matters, and things as shall be necessary and proper, and to require that houses shall be supplied with water,’ and to ‘make and levy water rates upon the premises, at a rate not exceeding twopence per week.’ With a power like this in your hands, you would easily enforce for the City of London whatever method of supply you might deliberately believe to be best; and you would then be enabled and entitled, in the application of other clauses in your Act, to require of landlords acting under your orders, a far completer, though less expensive, improvement of their property than you are yet in a position to obtain.
In submitting to your Hon. Court my views as to the expediency of your having a controlling power over the supply of water, I am glad to find myself supported by the recorded opinion of the present Lord Mayor, himself formerly the Chairman of a Commission of Sewers; and I am induced to believe that such an addition to your functions might not be objectionable to the water companies, as I observe that Sir William Clay, the chairman of two metropolitan companies, has expressed himself strongly on its ‘great and obvious convenience.’
2. Of equal importance with anything which relates to the distribution of water are those momentous questions which relate to its quality, and which tend to determine its fitness for human consumption.
Considering the great share of public attention which these questions at present very properly obtain, the many projects which are broached for improving the quality of our metropolitan supply, and the importance of your being in a position to decide as to the merits of any plan which may affect the City of London, I have thought it desirable in this Report to submit to you some general observations on the subject. During the last few months, I have accordingly been collecting such information as might, in my judgment, be useful for this purpose. In pursuing one portion of my inquiry—that which relates to the chemical constitution of certain waters, I have availed myself of the permission of your Hon. Court to procure a limited amount of assistance from some one more conversant than myself with the practice of analysis. For this purpose I have addressed myself to Mr. Thomas Taylor, lately Lecturer on Chemistry at St. Thomas’s Hospital, a gentleman on whose skill and impartiality I can implicitly trust. His account of the very careful analyses which he has made is subjoined to my Report.[48] Concurrently with the experience of other chemists, it has furnished me with material for many of the conclusions which I am about to lay before you.
[48] See [page 168].
The water which is supplied by the New River and East London companies for the consumption of the City of London is substantially of one kind. The River Lea, on which the East London Company entirely depends, furnishes likewise much of the supply conveyed by the New River.[49] The springs in which the latter originate are of the same chemical kind as those which contribute to the Lea; and the artificial aqueduct runs its forty miles of course through much the same country as the natural river. Chemically, therefore, one description may apply to both; and I the rather speak of them conjointly, as any extension of its resources for our supply which the New River might obtain, would apparently be provided by increasing considerably its present draught from the Lea.
[49] It appears that the New River Company at present derives about two-thirds of its supply from the River Lea, and proposes to draw from this source a still larger proportion. Any chemical difference of quality in the City pipe-water (as between that supplied by the New River and that by the East London Company) would probably not exceed those limits of difference which prevail in respect of waters gathered under varying circumstances from one and the same source.
The pipe-water consumed in the City has for its general chemical character, that it contains a considerable quantity of carbonate of lime, held in solution by an excess of carbonic acid. To this and another salt of lime (the sulphate) the water chiefly owes the property which is complained of under the name of hardness: it is by reason of these salts, namely, that it decomposes a certain large proportion of whatever soap is used with it; preventing the formation of a lather, till those salts are exhausted by a wasted proportion of soap, by boiling or otherwise, and hindering to that extent the several purposes for which soap is employed. You are probably aware that soda is extensively used in the laundry, as an antidote to this objectionable quality of hard waters; and the excess of its employment tends, by corrosion, very observably to hasten the destruction of washed articles of dress. In the same measure as water possesses the property of decomposing soap, its utility as an universal solvent is impaired; it extends to various other substances which one seeks to dissolve in it (especially to many vegetable matters) that same disposition to waste them in the form of insoluble precipitates. Its conveniences for the purposes of cooking and manufacture are pari passu diminished.
Of the actual extent of which these disadvantages are sustained within the City of London, I have no means of forming an exact opinion; but statements are before the public (from the general correctness of which I have no reason to withhold reliance and belief) rating the pecuniary loss to the metropolis, in the two articles of soap and tea, at a very high figure. You will see from Mr. Taylor’s observations the proportion in which waste occurs, as regards one of these articles; namely that, for the production of a lather in washing, the pipe-water of the City of London, used without boiling, consumes from 13 to 19 times as much soap as distilled water would consume.[50]