1. One is, to transport it to a river, or some powerfully current
stream by a series of ducts.
2. The other is, to dig a hole in the neighbourhood of the house,
there collect the wet refuse of the household, and when the hole or
pit becomes full, remove the contents to some other part.
In London the most obvious means of getting rid of a nuisance is to
convey it into the Thames. Nor has this been done in London only. In
Paris the Seine is the receptacle of the sewage, but, comparatively, to
a much smaller extent than in London. The fæcal deposits accumulated
in the houses of the French capital are drained into “fixed” and
“moveable” cesspools. The contents of both these descriptions of
cesspools (of which I shall give an account when I treat of the
cesspool system) are removed periodically, under the direction of the
government, to large receptacles, called _voiries_, at Montfaucon, and
the Forest of Bondy, where such refuse is made into portable manure.
The evils of this system are not a few; but the river is spared the
greater pollution of the Thames. Neither is the Seine swayed by the
tide as is the Thames, for in London the very sewers are affected by
the tidal influence, and are not to be entered until some time before
or after high-water. I need not do more, for my present inquiry, than
allude to the Liffy, the Clyde, the Humber, and others of the rivers of
the United Kingdom, being used for purposes of sewerage, as channels to
carry off that of which the law prohibits the retention.
Of the folly, not to say wickedness, of this principle, there can be
no doubt. The vegetation which gives, demands food. The grass will
wither without its fitting nutriment of manure, as the sheep would
perish without the pasturage of the grass. Nature, in temperate and
moist climates, is, so to speak, her own manurer, her own restorer. The
sheep, which are as wild and active as goats, manure the Cumberland
fells in which they feed. In the more cultivated sheep-walks (or,
indeed, in the general pasturage) of the northern and some of the
midland counties, women, with a wooden implement, may be continually
seen in the later autumn, or earlier and milder winter, distributing
the “stercoraceous treasure,” as Cowper calls it, which the animals, to
use the North Yorkshire word, have “dropped,” as well as any extraneous
manure which may have been spread for the purpose. As population and
the demand for bread increase, the need of extraneous manures also
increases; and Nature in her beneficence has provided that the greater
the consumption of food, the greater shall be the promoters of its
reproduction by what is loathsome to man, but demanded by vegetation.
Liebig, as I shall afterwards show more fully, contends that many an
arid and desolate region in the East, brown and burnt with barrenness,
became a desolation because men understood not the restoration which
all nature demands for the land. He declares that the now desolate
regions of the East had been made desolate, because “the inhabitants
did not understand the art of restoring exhausted soil.” It would be
hopeless now to form, or attempt to form, the “hanging gardens,” or to
display the rich florescence “round about Babylon,” to be seen when
Alexander the Great died in that city. The Tigris and Euphrates, before
and after their junction, Liebig maintains, have carried, and, to a
circumscribed degree, still carry, into the sea “a sufficient amount
of manure for the reproduction of food for millions of human beings.”
It is said that, “could that matter only be arrested in its progress,
and converted into bread and wine, fruit and beef, mutton and wool,
linen and cotton, then cities might flourish once more in the desert,
where men are now digging for the relics of primitive civilization, and
discovering the symbols of luxury and ease beneath the barren sand and
the sunburnt clay.”
This is one great evil; but in our metropolis there is a greater, a far
greater, beyond all in degree, even if the same abuse exist elsewhere.
What society with one consent pronounces filth--the evacuations of
the human body--is not only washed into the Thames, and the land so
deprived of a vast amount of nutriment, but the tide washes these
evacuations back again, with other abominations. The water we use is
derived almost entirely from the Thames, and therefore the water in
which we boil our vegetables and our meat, the water for our coffee and
tea, the water brewed for our consumption, comes to us, and is imbibed
by us, impregnated over and over again with our own animal offal. We
import guano, and drink a solution of our own fæces: a manure which
might be made far more valuable than the foreign guano.
Such are a few of the evils of making a common sewer of the
neighbouring river.
The other mode of removal is, to convey the wet house-refuse, by
drains, to a hole near the house where it is produced, and empty it
periodically when full.
The house-drainage throughout London has two characteristics. By
one system all excrementitious and slop refuse generally is carried
usually along brick drains from the water-closets, privies, sinks,
lavatories, &c., of the houses into the cesspools, where it accumulates
until its removal (by manual labour) becomes necessary, which is not,
as an average, more than once in two years. By the other, and the
newer system, all the house-refuse is drained into the public sewer,
the cesspool system being thereby abolished. All the houses built or
rebuilt since 1848 are constructed on the last-mentioned principle of
drainage.
The first of these modes is cesspoolage.
The second is sewerage.