Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

“Because we cannot afford it.  No one would buy the water when we had stored it.  The rich in town and country will always take care—and quite right they are—to have water enough for themselves, and for their servants too, whatever it may cost them.  But the poorer people are—and therefore usually, alas! the more ignorant—the less water they get; and the less they care to have water; and the less they are inclined to pay for it; and the more, I am sorry to say, they waste what little they do get; and I am still more sorry to say, spoil, and even steal and sell—in London at least—the stop-cocks and lead-pipes which bring the water into their houses.  So that keeping a water-shop is a very troublesome and uncertain business; and one which is not likely to pay us or anyone round here.”

“But why not let some company manage it, as they manage railways, and gas, and other things?”

“Ah—you have been overhearing a good deal about companies of late, I see.  But this I will tell you; that when you grow up, and have a vote and influence, it will be your duty, if you intend to be a good citizen, not only not to put the water-supply of England into the hands of fresh companies, but to help to take out of their hands what water-supply they manage already, especially in London; and likewise the gas-supply; and the railroads; and everything else, in a word, which everybody uses, and must use.  For you must understand—at least as soon as you can—that though the men who make up companies are no worse than other men, and some of them, as you ought to know, very good men; yet what they have to look to is their profits; and the less water they supply, and the worse it is, the more profit they make.  For most water, I am sorry to say, is fouled before the water companies can get to it, as this water which runs past us will be, and as the Thames water above London is.  Therefore it has to be cleansed, or partly cleansed, at a very great expense.  So water companies have to be inspected—in plain English, watched—at a very heavy expense to the nation by Government officers; and compelled to do their best, and take their utmost care.  And so it has come to pass that the London water is not now nearly as bad as some of it was thirty years ago, when it was no more fit to drink than that in the cattle-yard tank.  But still we must have more water, and better, in London; for it is growing year by year.  There are more than three millions of people already in what we call London; and ere you are an old man there may be between four and five millions.  Now to supply all these people with water is a duty which we must not leave to any private companies.  It must be done by a public authority, as is fit and proper in a free self-governing country.  In this matter, as in all others, we will try to do what the Royal Commission told us four years ago we ought to do.  I hope that you will see, though I may not, the day when what we call London, but which is really nine-tenths of it, only a great nest of separate villages huddled together, will be divided into three great self-governing cities, London, Westminster, and Southwark; each with its own corporation, like that of the venerable and well-governed city of London; each managing its own water-supply, gas-supply, and sewage, and other matters besides; and managing them, like Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great northern towns, far more cheaply and far better than any companies can do it for them.”

“But where shall we get water enough for all these millions of people?  There are no mountains near London.  But we might give them the water off our moors.”

“No, no, my boy,

“He that will not when he may,When he will, he shall have nay.

Some fifteen years ago the Londoners might have had water from us; and I was one of those who did my best to get it for them: but the water companies did not choose to take it; and now this part of England is growing so populous and so valuable that it wants all its little rainfall for itself.  So there is another leaf torn out of the Sibylline books for the poor old water companies.  You do not understand: you will some day.  But you may comfort yourself about London.  For it happens to be, I think, the luckiest city in the world; and if it had not been, we should have had pestilence on pestilence in it, as terrible as the great plague of Charles II.’s time.  The old Britons, without knowing in the least what they were doing, settled old London city in the very centre of the most wonderful natural reservoir in this island, or perhaps in all Europe; which reaches from Kent into Wiltshire, and round again into Suffolk; and that is, the dear old chalk downs.”

“Why, they are always dry.”

“Yes.  But the turf on them never burns up, and the streams which flow through them never run dry, and seldom or never flood either.  Do you not know, from Winchester, that that is true?  Then where is all the rain and snow gone, which falls on them year by year, but into the chalk itself, and into the green-sands, too, below the chalk?  There it is, soaked up as by a sponge, in quantity incalculable; enough, some think, to supply London, let it grow as huge as it may.  I wish I too were sure of that.  But the Commission has shown itself so wise and fair, and brave likewise—too brave, I am sorry to say, for some who might have supported them—that it is not for me to gainsay their opinion.”

“But if there was not water enough in the chalk, are not the Londoners rich enough to bring it from any distance?”

“My boy, in this also we will agree with the Commission—that we ought not to rob Peter to pay Paul, and take water to a distance which other people close at hand may want.  Look at the map of England and southern Scotland; and see for yourself what is just, according to geography and nature.  There are four mountain-ranges; four great water-fields.  First, the hills of the Border.  Their rainfall ought to be stored for the Lothians and the extreme north of England.  Then the Yorkshire and Derbyshire Hills—the central chine of England.  Their rainfall is being stored already, to the honour of the shrewd northern men, for the manufacturing counties east and west of the hills.  Then come the Lake mountains—the finest water-field of all, because more rain by far falls there than in any place in England.  But they will be wanted to supply Lancashire, and some day Liverpool itself; for Liverpool is now using rain which belongs more justly to other towns; and besides, there are plenty of counties and towns, down into Cheshire, which would be glad of what water Lancashire does not want.  At last come the Snowdon mountains, a noble water-field, which I know well; for an old dream of mine has been, that ere I died I should see all the rain of the Carnedds, and the Glyders, and Siabod, and Snowdon itself, carried across the Conway river to feed the mining districts of North Wales, where the streams are now all foul with oil and lead; and then on into the western coal and iron fields, to Wolverhampton and Birmingham itself: and if I were the engineer who got that done, I should be happier—prouder I dare not say—than if I had painted nobler pictures than Raffaelle, or written nobler plays than Shakespeare.  I say that, boy, in most deliberate earnest.  But meanwhile, do you not see that in districts where coal and iron may be found, and fresh manufactures may spring up any day in any place, each district has a right to claim the nearest rainfall for itself?  And now, when we have got the water into its proper place, let us see what we shall do with it.”

“But why do you say ‘we’?  Can you and I do all this?”

“My boy, are not you and I free citizens; part of the people, the Commons—as the good old word runs—of this country?  And are we not—or ought we not to be in time—beside that, educated men?  By the people, remember, I mean, not only the hand-working man who has just got a vote; I mean the clergy of all denominations; and the gentlemen of the press; and last, but not least, the scientific men.  If those four classes together were to tell every government—‘Free water we will have, and as much as we reasonably choose;’ and tell every candidate for the House of Commons: ‘Unless you promise to get us as much free water as we reasonably choose, we will not return you to Parliament:’ then, I think, we four should put such a ‘pressure’ on Government as no water companies, or other vested interests, could long resist.  And if any of those four classes should hang back, and waste their time and influence over matters far less important and less pressing, the other three must laugh at them, and more than laugh at them; and ask them: ‘Why have you education, why have you influence, why have you votes, why are you freemen and not slaves, if not to preserve the comfort, the decency, the health, the lives of men, women, and children—most of those latter your own wives and your own children?’”

“But what shall we do with the water?”

“Well, after all, that is a more practical matter than speculations grounded on the supposition that all classes will do their duty.  But the first thing we will do will be to give to the very poorest houses a constant supply, at high pressure; so that everybody may take as much water as he likes, instead of having to keep the water in little cisterns, where it gets foul and putrid only too often.”

“But will they not waste it then?”

“So far from it, wherever the water has been laid on at high pressure, the waste, which is terrible now—some say that in London one-third of the water is wasted—begins to lessen; and both water and expense are saved.  If you will only think, you will see one reason why.  If a woman leaves a high-pressure tap running, she will flood her place and her neighbour’s too.  She will be like the magician’s servant, who called up the demon to draw water for him; and so he did: but when he had begun he would not stop, and if the magician had not come home, man and house would have been washed away.”

“But if it saves money, why do not the water companies do it?”

“Because—and really here there are many excuses for the poor old water companies, when so many of them swerve and gib at the very mention of constant water-supply, like a poor horse set to draw a load which he feels is too heavy for him—because, to keep everything in order among dirty, careless, and often drunken people, there must be officers with lawful authority—water-policemen we will call them—who can enter people’s houses when they will, and if they find anything wrong with the water, set it to rights with a high hand, and even summon the people who have set it wrong.  And that is a power which, in a free country, must never be given to the servants of any private company, but only to the officers of a corporation or of the Government.”

“And what shall we do with the rest of the water?”

“Well, we shall have, I believe, so much to spare that we may at least do this: In each district of each city, and the centre of each town, we may build public baths and lavatories, where poor men and women may get their warm baths when they will; for now they usually never bathe at all, because they will not—and ought not, if they be hard-worked folk—bathe in cold water during nine months of the year.  And there they shall wash their clothes, and dry them by steam; instead of washing them as now, at home, either under back sheds, where they catch cold and rheumatism, or too often, alas! in their own living rooms, in an atmosphere of foul vapour, which drives the father to the public-house and the children into the streets; and which not only prevents the clothes from being thoroughly dried again, but is, my dear boy, as you will know when you are older, a very hot-bed of disease.  And they shall have other comforts, and even luxuries, these public lavatories; and be made, in time, graceful and refining, as well as merely useful.  Nay, we will even, I think, have in front of each of them a real fountain; not like the drinking-fountains—though they are great and needful boons—which you see here and there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water to a great deal of expensive stone: but real fountains, which shall leap, and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle; and fill the place with life, and light, and coolness; and sing in the people’s ears the sweetest of all earthly songs—save the song of a mother over her child—the song of ‘The Laughing Water.’”

“But will not that be a waste?”

“Yes, my boy.  And for that very reason, I think we, the people, will have our fountains; if it be but to make our governments, and corporations, and all public bodies and officers, remember that they all—save Her Majesty the Queen—are our servants, and not we theirs; and that we choose to have water, not only to wash with, but to play with, if we like.  And I believe—for the world, as you will find, is full not only of just but of generous souls—that if the water-supply were set really right, there would be found, in many a city, many a generous man who, over and above his compulsory water-rate, would give his poor fellow-townsmen such a real fountain as those which ennoble the great square at Carcasonne and the great square at Nismes; to be ‘a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’”

“And now, if you want to go back to your Latin and Greek, you shall translate for me into Latin—I do not expect you to do it into Greek, though it would turn very well into Greek, for the Greeks know all about the matter long before the Romans—what follows here; and you shall verify the facts and the names, etc., in it from your dictionaries of antiquity and biography, that you may remember all the better what it says.  And by that time, I think, you will have learnt something more useful to yourself, and, I hope, to your country hereafter, than if you had learnt to patch together the neatest Greek and Latin verses which have appeared since the days of Mr. Canning.”

* * * * *

I have often amused myself, by fancying one question which an old Roman emperor would ask, were he to rise from his grave and visit the sights of London under the guidance of some minister of state.  The august shade would, doubtless, admire our railroads and bridges, our cathedrals and our public parks, and much more of which we need not be ashamed.  But after awhile, I think, he would look round, whether in London or in most of our great cities, inquiringly and in vain, for one class of buildings, which in his empire were wont to be almost as conspicuous and as splendid, because, in public opinion, almost as necessary, as the basilicas and temples: “And where,” he would ask, “are your public baths?”  And if the minister of state who was his guide should answer: “Oh great Cæsar, I really do not know.  I believe there are some somewhere at the back of that ugly building which we call the National Gallery; and I think there have been some meetings lately in the East End, and an amateur concert at the Albert Hall, for restoring, by private subscriptions, some baths and wash-houses in Bethnal Green, which had fallen to decay.  And there may be two or three more about the metropolis; for parish vestries have powers by Act of Parliament to establish such places, if they think fit, and choose to pay for them out of the rates.”  Then, I think, the august shade might well make answer: “We used to call you, in old Rome, northern barbarians.  It seems that you have not lost all your barbarian habits.  Are you aware that, in every city in the Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, public baths open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usually for the payment of the smallest current coin, and often gratuitously?  Are you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperor after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian and Constantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with them gymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticoes, wherein the people might have shade, and shelter, and rest?  I remark, by-the-bye, that I have not seen in all your London a single covered place in which the people may take shelter during a shower.  Are you aware that these baths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated with marbles, paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not?  And yet I had heard, in Hades down below, that you prided yourselves here on the study of the learned languages; and, indeed, taught little but Greek and Latin at your public schools?”

Then, if the minister should make reply: “Oh yes, we know all this.  Even since the revival of letters in the end of the fifteenth century a whole literature has been written—a great deal of it, I fear, by pedants who seldom washed even their hands and faces—about your Greek and Roman baths.  We visit their colossal ruins in Italy and elsewhere with awe and admiration; and the discovery of a new Roman bath in any old city of our isles sets all our antiquaries buzzing with interest.”

“Then why,” the shade might ask, “do you not copy an example which you so much admire?  Surely England must be much in want, either of water, or of fuel to heat it with?”

“On the contrary, our rainfall is almost too great; our soil so damp that we have had to invent a whole art of subsoil drainage unknown to you; while, as for fuel, our coal-mines make us the great fuel-exporting people of the world.”

What a quiet sneer might curl the lip of a Constantine as he replied: “Not in vain, as I said, did we call you, some fifteen hundred years ago, the barbarians of the north.  But tell me, good barbarian, whom I know to be both brave and wise—for the fame of your young British empire has reached us even in the realms below, and we recognise in you, with all respect, a people more like us Romans than any which has appeared on earth for many centuries—how is it you have forgotten that sacred duty of keeping the people clean, which you surely at one time learnt from us?  When your ancestors entered our armies, and rose, some of them, to be great generals, and even emperors, like those two Teuton peasants, Justin and Justinian, who, long after my days, reigned in my own Constantinople: then, at least, you saw baths, and used them; and felt, after the bath, that you were civilised men, and not ‘sordidi ac foetentes,’ as we used to call you when fresh out of your bullock-waggons and cattle-pens.  How is it that you have forgotten that lesson?”

The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors were barbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and temples, and basilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise; and then retired, each man to his own freehold in the country, to live a life not much more cleanly or more graceful than that of the swine which were his favourite food.  But he would have a right to plead, as an excuse, that not only in England, but throughout the whole of the conquered Latin empire, the Latin priesthood, who, in some respects, were—to their honour—the representatives of Roman civilisation and the protectors of its remnants, were the determined enemies of its cleanliness; that they looked on personal dirt—like the old hermits of the Thebaid—as a sign of sanctity; and discouraged—as they are said to do still in some of the Romance countries of Europe—the use of the bath, as not only luxurious, but also indecent.

At which answer, it seems to me, another sneer might curl the lip of the august shade, as he said to himself: “This, at least, I did not expect, when I made Christianity the state religion of my empire.  But you, good barbarian, look clean enough.  You do not look on dirt as a sign of sanctity?”

“On the contrary, sire, the upper classes of our empire boast of being the cleanliest—perhaps the only perfectly cleanly—people in the world: except, of course, the savages of the South Seas.  And dirt is so far from being a thing which we admire, that our scientific men—than whom the world has never seen wiser—have proved to us, for a whole generation past, that dirt is the fertile cause of disease and drunkenness, misery, and recklessness.”

“And, therefore,” replies the shade, ere he disappears, “of discontent and revolution: followed by a tyranny endured, as in Rome and many another place, by men once free; because tyranny will at least do for them what they are too lazy, and cowardly, and greedy, to do for themselves.  Farewell, and prosper; as you seem likely to prosper, on the whole.  But if you wish me to consider you a civilised nation: let me hear that you have brought a great river from the depths of the earth, be they a thousand fathoms deep, or from your nearest mountains, be they five hundred miles away; and have washed out London’s dirt—and your own shame.  Till then, abstain from judging too harshly a Constantine, or even a Caracalla; for they, whatever were their sins, built baths, and kept their people clean.  But do your gymnasia—your schools and universities, teach your youth naught about all this?”

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The more I have contemplated that ancient story of the Fall, the more it has seemed to me within the range of probability, and even of experience.  It must have happened somewhere for the first time; for it has happened only too many times since.  It has happened, as far as I can ascertain, in every race, and every age, and every grade of civilisation.  It is happening round us now in every region of the globe.  Always and everywhere, it seems to me, have poor human beings been tempted to eat of some “tree of knowledge,” that they may be, even for an hour, as gods; wise, but with a false wisdom; careless, but with a frantic carelessness; and happy, but with a happiness which, when the excitement is past, leaves too often—as with that hapless pair in Eden—depression, shame, and fear.  Everywhere, and in all ages, as far as I can ascertain, has man been inventing stimulants and narcotics to supply that want of vitality of which he is so painfully aware; and has asked nature, and not God, to clear the dull brain, and comfort the weary spirit.

This has been, and will be perhaps for many a century to come, almost the most fearful failing of this poor, exceptional, over-organised, diseased, and truly fallen being called Man, who is in doubt daily whether he be a god or an ape; and in trying wildly to become the former, ends but too often in becoming the latter.

For man, whether savage or civilised, feels, and has felt in every age, that there is something wrong with him.  He usually confesses this fact—as is to be expected—of his fellow-men, rather than of himself; and shows his sense that there is something wrong with them by complaining of, hating, and killing them.  But he cannot always conceal from himself the fact that he, too, is wrong, as well as they; and as he will not usually kill himself, he tries wild ways to make himself at least feel—if not to be—somewhat “better.”  Philosophers may bid him be content; and tell him that he is what he ought to be, and what nature has made him.  But he cares nothing for the philosophers.  He knows, usually, that he is not what he ought to be; that he carries about with him, in most cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of doing all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing all the emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dull senses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as—so Goethe once said with pity—the horse’s single hoof cramps the fine intelligence and generosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, like the more stupid cat, and baser monkey.  And man has a self, too, within, from which he longs too often to escape, as from a household ghost; who pulls out, at unfortunately rude and unwelcome hours, the ledger of memory.  And so when the tempter—be he who he may—says to him, “Take this, and you will ‘feel better.’  Take this, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil:” then, if the temptation was, as the old story says, too much for man while healthy and unfallen, what must it be for his unhealthy and fallen children?

In vain we say to man:

’Tis life, not death, for which you pant;’Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant;More life, and fuller, that you want.

And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is in every case, the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery.  He prefers the voice of the tempter: “Thou shalt not surely die.”  Nay, he will say at last: “Better be as gods awhile, and die: than be the crawling, insufficient thing I am; and live.”

He—did I say?  Alas! I must say she likewise.  The sacred story is only too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling, not merely at the same time as the man, but before the man.  Only let us remember that it represents the woman as tempted; tempted, seemingly, by a rational being, of lower race, and yet of superior cunning; who must, therefore, have fallen before the woman.  Who or what the being was, who is called the Serpent in our translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say.  We have absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical traditions need trouble no man much.  But I fancy that a missionary, preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them plainly that the “Serpent” meant the first Obeah man; and then comparing the experiences of that hapless pair in Eden, with their own after certain orgies not yet extinct in Africa and elsewhere, would be only too well understood: so well, indeed, that he might run some risk of eating himself, not of the tree of life, but of that of death.  The sorcerer or sorceress tempting the woman; and then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be, certainly among savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised peoples also, the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.