J. A. Judson

“ The question of cost should never for a moment weigh against the question of purity of quality. Foul, though apparently pure, water may be the cheaper in the beginning, but it will surely be the dearer to the community in the end, when it is remembered that health and life itself tremble in the balance. Cost and quantity should not be underrated, certainly, neither should quality. ”

“ LITTLE as it appears to be appreciated, there is to-day no question of sanitary science of greater vital importance than that of the quality of the water-supply entering into the daily domestic economy. The requirements and refinements of modern civilization demand not only a plentiful but a profuse supply of water, and at a moderate cost—facts long ago recognized and acted upon. ”

“ As people generally have a vague idea of what sewage consists, any further than that it is a nasty mess, it may be well, in closing this article, to give the definition of the term "sewage" as applied by the English Rivers Pollution Commissioners. It is "any refuse from human habitations that may affect the public health. . . . Sewage is a very complex liquid; a large proportion of its most offensive matters is, of course, human excrement discharged from water-closets and privies, and also urine thrown down gully-holes. ”

“ Shallow-well water is declared by the Rivers Pollution Commissioners to be the most dangerous of all waters, "whenever the wells are situated, as is usually the case, near privies, drains, and cesspools;" and it is this shallow-well water that Denton refers to when he goes on to say the commissioners declare that "such polluted surface or drainage water (referred to above) is not of good quality for domestic purposes, but it may be used with less risk to health than polluted shallow-well water, if human excrementitious matters do not form part of the manure applied to the land." ”

“ The "controlling vitality" of plants and man have widely differing requirements: what is food to one is to the other poison, and sewage polluted water is just what the Brighton gardener uses.
Dr. Corfield says, in a lecture before the Royal School of Military Engineering at Chatham, that ". . . mere passage over the soil will not purify sewage satisfactorily. The effluent water which goes off the land is, to all intents and purposes, sewage." ”

“ The dense population of England, and the resultant mass of concentrated filth, have there compelled attention to those laws of health that we, with our enormous area of comparatively thinly-settled country, and the consequent high dilution of foul water and foul air, have felt safe in disregarding. This feeling of safety is, however, fallacious; for, as facts attest, "filth-diseases" are as liable to break out in an isolated house as in a crowded city, if the fundamental hygienic laws are violated. ”

“ We can safely conclude that it is the quality of the sewage-matter that determines the character and virulence of its poisonous effects, rather than the quantity of foul matter that may be present in the drinking-water, the taint from the fecal matter of one sick person creating wider-spread havoc than that from hundreds of those "that need no physician." ”

“ It is not impossible to point out authorities on sanitary matters so wedded to pet theories that they unhesitatingly deny that the conversion of a pure running stream, or even a large river, into a conduit for the sewage-filth of a great city, will have any deleterious effect on the potable quality of the water taken a few miles below the filth-entering point. ”

“ When the heavy rains of spring and fall occur, the effluent water from those slopes is dilute sewage, dilute human excrement, and, especially if the land has been recently ploughed, a large quantity of the surface-soil, and with it the freshly-applied human excreta, and the remaining noxious parts of the previously-applied batch of filth still present in the soil, must necessarily be, and is, washed down-hill and into the water-supply of the town. ”

“ Nevertheless, if the quantity of polluting matter be less, so is the volume of water polluted, hence the proportion of foulment may be approximately the same. At any rate the fact remains that the water is contaminated, and, as has been already shown, infinitesimal may be quite as fatal as profuse pollution.
The elements that go to make dilute sewage unfit for assimilation in man, especially fit it for plant-food, a fact well known to every gardener. Dr. Folsom says that "a celebrated horticulturist in Brighton, England, dilutes his manure until it has neither taste nor smell." ”

“ Too much stress cannot be laid on the death lurking in all manner of human excreta, especially those of the sick. Dr. Folsom, the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, and one of the first sanitary authorities, says: "In no case is it entirely safe to drink water which has once been contaminated with human excreta containing the germs of disease, unless it has been exposed-to a sufficiently high temperature or has stood long enough for these 'germs' to become inert. ”

“ Our town can and must stand such and such a death-rate, but no more; let us risk it and take our water from this contaminated pond close by, and let the death-rate be so and so, rather than spend so many thousands more in bringing pure living water from the everlasting hills miles away, and thus reduce our death-rate to the minimum! ”

“ It is well known that many years ago the pollution of the watercourses began to excite public attention in England, and the labors of the several "Rivers Pollution Commissions," and other sanitary committees organized by authority of Parliament, bear testimony in their elaborate and invaluable reports to the truth that humanity can no longer afford to ignore that foul water will breed disease. ”

“ It has been objected that no water outside the laboratory is absolutely "pure;" that water ordinarily available for town-supply is only relatively pure, and that too high a degree of purity must not be expected, lest the cost of the works be too great a public burden. ”

“ Water, then, is of all things the one most essential to our existence, and if three-quarters of our very bodies and a large part of our daily food are composed of this element, then, like Cæsar's wife, it should be "clear even of suspicion." ”

“ While enormous capital and the best engineering talent have been very generally called upon, both in this country and in Europe, to economically furnish water in ample quantity, a corresponding degree of skill and enterprise has not always been directed to the determination of its quality. ”

“ While wholesale river-pollution from any source is utterly inadmissible on any sanitary grounds, so infinitesimal pollution by dilute sewage, indirectly discharged into the water-course, is equally dangerous, and attended with sure though more remote fatal results, "especially if human excreta he present in any form whatever." ”

“ The investigating officer reported that "not one household to which the milk was traced did he find entirely free from the disease."
Liebermeister, an eminent authority, says, speaking of the spread of typhoid fever through water-works: "Such infection of an aqueduct is most easily effected when excrements from privies containing the typhoid poison are used as manure on the fields from which the aqueduct receives its supply. In this way originated the epidemic in Stuttgart in the year 1872." ”

“ In cases where privies and cesspools are used instead of water closets, or these are not connected with sewers, there is a still larger proportion of human refuse in the form of chamber-slops and urine. ”

“ Human excremental matter is the most dangerous organic substance likely to be contained in privy-vaults or cesspools, and its virulence is largely increased when it consists partly of the excrementitious matter of cholera and fever patients. ”

“ And again he says that, "under certain conditions, human excrementitious matter in certain diseases is almost certain poison, producing the parent-disease in great numbers of cases of those exposed to it, with a degree of virulence proportional to its concentration." ”

“ This is what we daily put in our mouths, and it certainly should be pure and sweet. In fact, one way or another, we are pretty much all water. It is said that "the model man weighs 154 pounds, of which 116 is water and only 38 pounds dry matter;" ”