to make swamps,
partly to waste, partly to rot, as it is used in tubs or cisterns. Rome in
her pride used once to supply water at the rate of more than three hundred
gallons daily to each citizen. That was excess. In London half a million
of people get no water at all into their houses; but as those people live
in the back settlements, and keep out of our sight, their dirt is no great
matter of concern. We, for our own parts, have enough to cook with, have
whereof to drink, wherewith to wash our feet sometimes, to wet our fingers
and the corner of a towel--we inquire no further. Drainage and all such
topics involve details positively nasty, and we blush for any of our
fellow-citizens who take delight in chattering about them.

We are told to regard the habits of an infant world. London, the brain of
a vast empire, is advised now to forget her civilization, and to go back
some thousand years. We are to look at Persian aqueducts, attributed to
Noah's great-grandson--at Carthaginians, Etruscans, Mexicans--at what Rome
did. It frets us when we are thus driven to an obvious reply. Man in an
unripe and half-civilized condition, has not found out the vulgarity of
water; for his brutish instinct is not overcome. All savages believe that
water is essential to their life and desire it in unlimited abundance.
Cultivation teaches us another life, in which our animal existence neither
gets nor merits much attention. As for the Romans, so perpetually quoted,
it was a freak of theirs to do things massively. While they were yet
almost barbarians, they built that Cloaca through which afterward Agrippa
sailed down to the Tiber in a boat. Who wishes to see His Worship the Lord
Mayor of London emerging in his state barge from a London sewer?

Now here is inconsistency. Thirty million gallons of corruption are added
daily by our London sewers to the Thames: that is one object of complaint,
good in itself, because we drink Thames water. But in the next breath it
is complained that a good many million gallons more should be poured out;
that there are three hundred thousand cesspools more to be washed up; that
as much filth as would make a lake six feet in depth, a mile long, and a
thousand feet across, lies under London stagnant; and they would wish this
also to be swept into the river. I heard lately of a gentleman who is
tormented with the constant fancy that he has a scorpion down his back. He
asks every neighbor to put in his hand and fetc