le casks of the street
department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow
in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious
creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.

You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of
half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her
rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter
of the expenses of our budget. The cleverness of man is such that he
prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is
the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by
drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the
rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Every
hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this spring two
results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising
from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is
poisoning London.

So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to
transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up
and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs
of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities
in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into
our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities,
and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us
the five hundred millions now thrown away. People are thinking of other
things.

The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good.
The intention is good, t