NON OLET.
Tagreat cities of England all want money. They cannot be taxed much more heavily, and the rise in the value of property which has for years passed helped them along has limits which seem to be nearly reached. Still they all want improvements, new streets, new quays, new baths, new libraries, and new buildings, and as these are all expensive, they listen eagerly to any prospect for obtaining new funds without increasing rates already reluctantly borne. Mr. Brady, therefore, when be asked, on Wednesday, for a Committee to sit on the means of deriving revenue from sewage, was certain of little indi- vidual opposition. He has a theory that the sewage might be made to piy all the rates, and the House, without quoting Vespasian's non okt, still acted upon the emperor's principle, and agreed cheer. fully to see whether stench might not be a taxable quality. The inquiry is a most practical one, and we only regret that Mr. Brady did not, in the first instance, limit it to London. The practicability of the scheme can be tested here on an enormous scale. The sewage is now in process of reformation, and practical men are eagerly watching for a possible profit to accrue from the collection in one spot of the sewage of the metropolis.
It is well known that Mr. Bazalgette, the engineer to whom the Board of Works have entrusted the execution of the main drainage of London, has very nearly completed his gigantic contracts, and that in a few short months all thd sewage of London, north of the Thames, beginning with Hampstead, Highgate, Kilburn, and Notting Hill, will be discharged into the Thames through some reservoirs at Barking Creek, a few miles below Bow Bridge and the Isle of Dogs. As the work approaches completion, however, the further question arises, whether the sewage, when carried down to that point, and there emptied into the Thames, will find its way down to the sea, and lose itself in the blue depths of what lEschylus—not living in these days—calls emphatically "the undefiled," but what we must be content more prosaically to term the ocean. And the more fully that the subjilPt is considered, the greater, we regret to say, appears to be the chance that, owing to the tidal action, old Father Thames will still hold the greater portion of the fcecal matter which he will receive at Barking Creek, in solution up and down his river-bed from Westminster and Chelsea down to Gravesend. In fact, it appears to be the conviction of the persons best capable of forming an opinion, that not less than 268,667,090, and not more than 328,884,990 tons of diluted sewage, will still be left to seethe up and down the Thames under our July sun, and to breed a pestilence in London as soon as the proper atmospherical conditions have been attained. It is clear, then, that even if the wall has been built which is to shut us out from the miasma of our own fcecal matter, that wall still lacks the coping-stone which shall render it in any sense complete.
It is clear that, oa.sanitary grounds alone, Mr. Bazalgette's plan needs a supplement, and one has been already suggested. As at present arranged, there are to be formed at Barking two large tanks or reservoirs—we shall frighten our readers by telling them that the one will be twelve acres and the other seven in extent, with a depth of fifteen feet, and that these tanks are to be emptied into the river at the ebb of every tide. Now, at the lowest possible computation, namely, estimating the value of the London sewage at twopence per ton, according to this plan we shall be throwing away into the river every year no less a sum than 2,220,0001., or some fifteen or sixteen shillings per head for every soul in our huge population—a sum more than sufficient to pay all the poor-rates, not only of London, but of half a dozen other large towns besides.
Such a gold-mine is worth the working, and Messrs. Hope and Napier have already organized a company, and deposited a sum of 70,000/. as a guarantee of good faith, with the view of obtaining the use of this sewage. Their plan is to carry the final matter by culverts some forty miles further down to the Essex coast, and there to turn it to practical account by reclaiming certain waste lands around an estuary below the marshes, which lands they believe that they can render sufficiently fertile to grow all kinds of grain, though they now lie as sterile and barren as the plains of Central Africa.
The Board of Works adjourned the proposal sine die—it may be with very good reason. The projectors may net have offered enough, and all Londoners ought to deprecate any scheme which leaves the revenue derived from the sewage dependent on the success or failure of any private company. A fixed price to be paid in cash for every ton of matter removed is the only reasonable Offer, and no monopoly of any kind ought, without careful consideration, to be so much as entertained. But it is at Barking that the great field for experiment will shortly be open, and it is to the possibility of selling the London sewage that the attention of Mr. Brady's Committee should first of all. be directed. If speculators can succeed when dealing with reservoirs so vast, they may succeed anywhere, and our municipalities may be placed once more in possession of the re- sources they need to meet the growing and most expensive demands of civilization.
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