Further—from what I have said as to the conditions of our vulnerability by Cholera, you will be prepared to think it of great importance that, during the next six months, you should be certified on the state of your sewers, in every part of the City, as to their greatest possible cleanliness and least possible offensiveness of ventilation. Fifty miles of sewer, reticulated through the City, sufficiently attest your active desire to provide for the complete and continuous carrying away of all excremental matters: and you will excuse me, I hope, in consideration of the anxieties of my office, if I seem superfluously cautious in reminding you that the test of successful sewers lies in an inodorous fulfilment of their duty, and that every complaint of offensive emanations indicates, in proportion to its extent, a failure of that sanitary object for which the construction was designed.
There is one precaution—always of great value to the health of towns, and especially useful against any malarious infection, which happily I find it needless to recommend. The paving of all public ways within the City—including every court and alley—is already so complete as to constitute a very favorable point in your sanitary defences. In order that this excellent arrangement may give its full fruit, it will be requisite—though this again I need hardly press on your consideration, that the duties of scavengers and dustmen be thoroughly and punctually performed.
Again, I would particularly advise that great vigilance be exercised in all markets, slaughtering-places, and other establishments under your jurisdiction, to prevent the retention of refuse-matter, animal or vegetable. I would urge the strictest enforcement of all regulations which you have made for the cleanliness of such places, and for the removal of their putrefiable refuse.
Likewise, I have to suggest that after the month of May, at latest, no disturbance of earth to any considerable depth should be allowed to take place, either in your works or in those of gas and water companies, except under circumstances of urgent necessity. In the lower levels of the City, particularly, I conceive this prohibition to be a matter of paramount importance; because the soil, never of unexceptionable cleanliness in towns, is here especially apt to be of offensive quality.
On the subject of water in its general relations to the City, I have only again to express my deep regret that it lies out of your present power to compel a continuous supply, and that your means are restricted to choosing what may best compensate for the absence of this sanitary boon. It must be your aim to mitigate, so far as may be, the evils that belong to an ill-regulated intermittent system in its adaptation to the houses of the poor—evils which imply, as I have often told you, not only much domestic dirt, but likewise a frequent suspension of all efficiency in the drainage of innumerable houses. With a view to the best alternative for a continuous supply, I would recommend that at least a daily filling of all cisternage take place, and expressly that Sunday form no exception to the advantages of this rule. If a choice of evils must be made, I trust it is no heathen’s part to urge that the Christian Sabbath suffers more desecration in the filth and preventable unwholesomeness of many thousand households, than in the honest industry of a dozen turncocks. I likewise submit, that it would be highly advantageous to the labouring poor, most of whose domestic cleansing is reserved for the last day of the week, that, on that day, a second delivery of water should take place at some hour in the afternoon.
I wish it were in my power to tell your Hon. Court that the supply of water to the City of London had become, in quality, all that I think it might be rendered. Such as it is, however, there depend other very important issues on its being delivered in ample abundance for all the purposes of cleanliness; and I am glad to have learned from the eminent engineer of the New River Company, that he has it in expectation very shortly to be able to furnish to the City a largely increased and practically inexhaustible supply.
The subject of water in its district relations ought hardly to be passed without a word of caution as to the use of pumps within the City. I need hardly inform you that every spring of water represents the drainage of a certain surface or thickness of soil, and that—such as are the qualities of this gathering ground, such must be the qualities of the water. You will, perhaps, remember that in my account of one celebrated City pump, which sucks from beneath a churchyard, I showed you ninety grains of solid matter in every gallon of its water. In virtue of that wonderful action which earth exerts on organic matter, the former contents of a coffin, here re-appearing in a spring, had undergone so complete a change as to be insusceptible of further putrefaction: the grateful coolness, so much admired in the produce of that popular pump, chiefly depending on a proportion of nitre, which arises in the chemical transformation of human remains, and which being dissolved in the water, gives it, I believe, some refrigerant taste and slight diuretic action. Undoubtedly this water is an objectionable beverage in respect of its several saline ingredients; but my present object in adverting to them is rather to illustrate an anterior danger which they imply. Their presence indicates a comparative completion of the putrefactive process, effected by the uniform filtration of organic solutions through a porous soil.[82] Let that soil have frequent fissures in its substance; or let its thickness be scanty in proportion to the organic matters to be acted on: and the water, imperfectly filtered, would run off foul and putrescent. Now this risk, more or less, belongs to all pumps within the City of London. They draw from a ground excavated in all directions by sewers, drains, cesspools, gas-pipes, burial-pits. The immense amount of organic matter which infiltrates the soil does undoubtedly, for the greater part, suffer oxidation, and pass into chemical repose: but in any particular case it is the merest chance, whether the glass of water raised to the mouth shall be fraught only with saline results of decomposition—in itself an objectionable issue—or shall contain organic refuse in the active and infectious stage of its earlier transformations. Some recent cutting of a trench, or breakage of a drain in the neighbourhood, may have converted a draught, which before was chronicly unwholesome, into one immediately perilous to life. Such facts ought to be known to all persons having custody of pumps within urban districts; and it ought likewise to be known that this infiltrative spoiling of springs may occur to the distance of many hundred yards.[83]
[82] This very important influence, exerted by the earth on various organic infiltrations, is referred to in the text only under one point of view; only as it occasions the deterioration of land-springs in urban districts, and renders their water unfit for consumption. But the subject has another equally important side. Such springs, having their waters laden with nitrates, represent the continuous removal of organic impurities which otherwise would contaminate the air. The evil of spoiled springs, therefore—while it necessitates for every urban population that their water-supply shall be artificially furnished from a distance, has great countervailing advantages. A given organic soakage will cease to vitiate the atmosphere by evaporation, in proportion as it gravitates to lower levels, and undergoes those chemical changes which accompany filtration through the soil. Hence it is evident that, for the healthiness of inhabited districts (where extensive soakage of organic matters is almost invariable) it becomes most important to maintain, or by artificial measures to accelerate, this down-draught through the soil; and the reader will scarcely need to be reminded, that, in those improvements of metropolitan sewerage, which it is a chief object of this Report to advocate, complete provision for the continuous drainage of soil is implied as an essential part.
[83] For a fact strikingly illustrative of this, I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. R. D. Thomson, Lecturer on Chemistry at St. Thomas’s Hospital. At Liverpool—in three wells which he examined, distant severally 760, 800, and 1050 yards from the Mersey, he found the water brackish from marine soakage, containing four or five hundred grains of solid matter per gallon, and totally unfit for consumption.
In final reference to the quality of water, whether supplied by our trading companies or derived from springs within the City, I think it expedient to mention that, against its lesser impurities, great protection is given by filtration through animal charcoal, as in various ‘filters and purifiers’ which are before the public. These protective means do not lie within reach of the poorer classes; nor, whatever their accessibility to individuals, can any such personal arrangements render it less important to provide that water—the first necessary of life—be supplied for universal use in its utmost procurable purity.