# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 2/The refuse of towns and cities

THE REFUSE OF TOWNS AND CITIES.
In every town and city throughout the world, which has not become a desert, a constant elevation of surface is imperceptibly going on. This arises from the fact that more materials are constantly brought in than are carried out. Building materials, fuel, and food, constitute the aggregate aids in this elevation after undergoing the various processes of utilisation. Some of the detritus, such as broken bricks and mortar, are not noxious. Others, as refuse food, human and animal remains, and excretal and many kinds of waste materials from workshops and factories, are deleterious chiefly because they are not removed, or destroyed chemically, so as to remove them in an innoxious gaseous form, or so to fix them as to prevent them forming noxious gases.
From day to day we “grin and bear” our nuisances, complaining of the neglect of the authorities, and wishing for their removal. It rarely occurs to us to consider how much of this lies in our own power, and that the evil might be reduced into a small compass, if we brought common sense to bear upon it. It is a practical fact, that we pray, or profess to pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” and that year after year we daily bring into our towns, upon the average, all the food and fuel we consume in the day. Our food we carefully stow away in safes and pantries, light, airy, and accessible; our fuel we put into accessible places; but for the greatly decreased bulk of our food and fuel in excreta and cinders we provide only dust-holes, almost inaccessible without great difficulty. Inasmuch as the bulk is so much reduced, it is clear that the means of transport which brings in the original amount in one day, could with greater ease take away the decreased bulk in one day, and this, whether from a single dwelling, or a great city.
Time was, that every dwelling was provided with what was called a cesspool, i.e. a gathering pool, in which ignorant people deposited every kind of refuse, solid or liquid, but in which more sagacious people deposited only solid matter, keeping as far as possible liquid matter from entering, or at least remaining in it. In many towns the ashes of the fuel were used or thrown into this pit, mixing with the night-soil or fæcal matter, and partly deodorising it, and the pit was emptied once a week or month. But in the great majority of houses the term cesspool is a misnomer. The term cess signifies a collection: but the ordinary cesspool, built of the worst possible bricks, uncemented and placed in a porous soil, is not a collecting but a distributing pit, filling the porous soil with fæcal matter by percolation. In a clay soil the pit is really a cess­pool, the clay being non-porous.
Time was, that—in London—these pits or cesspools, were prohibited from all communication with the sewers under heavy penalties, and in some districts hand pumps were used to draw off the liquid contents into the open side drains in the streets, and the solid matter was collected, sometimes for years, because the operation of emptying, for want of convenience, was loathsome, and a nuisance prohibited at all times except at night, hence the term night-soil. This gave rise to the invention of the water-closet communicating with the house drain, and so with the sewers, and the river. An admirable contrivance was the closet—for the rich man living on the upper ground. He could, by merely laying on water, get a cheap transference of all filthy matters. The drains were out of sight, the sewers out of sight; but he was rich enough to pay people for digging them up without suffering the foulness to enter his dwelling. The mere possession of one of these closets was an indication of wealth; and tracing the course of the Stygian stream to its final ending, a foul Serbonian bog, did not enter into the thoughts of the wealthy man.
But time rolled on, and the luxury of the wealthy man grew to be the common practice of the middle-class man. Finally, the owners of all dwellings were required to wash away their excreta into the sewer. Not half London has complied with the enjoinder, and already the Thames ​has become a black ditch, and the floating-baths that erewhile served to wash the London population in mid-stream have disappeared. The nuisance that had descended from the dwellings of the rich in water-percolation has turned back upon them in air-percolation. Whitebait dinners at Blackwall cause the gorge to rise with the pollution of the breathing organs.
The Board of Health, as represented by Mr. Edwin Chadwick, had an obstinate idea—a one idea—that cheapness consisted in low cost. Carrying away refuse is a matter of transit, and no transit is so cheap as water-transit. Once on a time a huge mass of mud had collected in one of the reservoirs of a water company. The engineer cubed out the quantities, and the cost of carting away and finding a site for the mud. It was too dear, so the horses and carts were dispensed with, and a number of workmen were set to work to stir up this mud while the water was put in motion, and it was all carried away in the stream—to what place of deposit was not asked.
Mr. Chadwick was delighted with the result, and recorded it, if I mistake not, in one of the blue-books. It got a hold of his mind, and water transit in sewers became thenceforward an idea. All the sewers were reduced, in his imagination, and glazed pipelets of clay were henceforward the be-all and end-all of drainage with constant streams of water running through them. Housemaids were to be enjoined to suffer no scrubbing-brushes to pass into them, and water was to be the solvent for every difficulty.
Now, if, with only half London closeted, the Thames is brought to the condition of a black ditch, what will be the result when the whole is closeted? And what will be the result when the population is doubled? The remedy proposed is this: a large portion of the water which should constitute the Thames is to be diverted from the centre to the sides, and at the outlet the whole is to be deodorised and converted into manure.
That is to say, the whole fæcal matter of London—a comparatively small bulk—is to be diluted to an enormous amount, polluting millions of gallons of water, as if, in that bulky condition, it can be easier dealt with than in its original small bulk, in order to carry out Mr. Chadwick’s crotchet of getting the sewage highly diluted for the sake of irrigating the land with liquid manure, like the Edinburgh “foul burn,” through glazed pipes; and that, after it is ascertained to be impracticable, and that the deodorised manure must be reduced to the dry condition.
In discussing this question with the most able member of the Metropolitan Board, he remarked to me, that the new sewers are only a remedy for a worse evil, and calculated, at most, for the next twenty-five years, when the increase of the population will defeat their end. If we had to begin de novo, deodorising house by house would be the true method.
Most persons have remarked how beautifully clean the streets of London are after a thunder­storm. This is scavenging by nature. Sewers are, for the most part, a contrivance to defeat this kind of scavenging. By sewers are to be understood deep underground drains, only acces­sible by passing through them. By surface-drains are not necessarily understood open drains, but drains following the natural inequalities of the surface, and which may be provided with covers to render them easy of access.
Storm-waters might thus be carried off and permitted to enter their natural exit, the river, wherever a river exists. There is little in the surface-washings to affect the natural streams.
Everything tending to putrify in the streams should be kept out of them. So also everything tending to clog the channel should be kept out. We do not throw ashes into the river, for this latter reason. Obnoxious matters are produced in dwellings and factories. Factories give refuse such as gas-water, and similar matters, well known as “blue billy,” surreptitiously discharged into the river, and giving out the poisonous gas, sulphuretted hydrogen. Dwellings furnish solid liquid fæcal matter, soapy and other water, containing refuse vegetable matter. Soapy water might without drainage pass into the river as innoxious sewage.
Vegetable water needs deodorising as it passes away, that is, putting into a condition in which it will not give off gases, precisely as is now largely done with the refuse of gas-works. With one exception the chief difficulty is the fæcal matter, and that is as noxious as the gas which permeates the earth below the streets leaking from the pipes, mixing with the sewage, and helping largely to pollute the river.
Gas is passed by pressure through a large extent of cast-iron piping of small dimensions. It has been said that it permeates the metal, but it certainly permeates the joints, and so escapes. The screw threads corroding in the pipes, the vibration of the passing vehicles shakes out the rust, and the gas goes out through the loose earth. This waste—a very heavy per-centage—raises the price of gas proportionately, at the same time that it lessens our supply of light and lowers our health, sometimes killing us outright by explosion or inhaling. The whole under-stratum of the streets and houses is saturated with this waste gas, which is in many ways reconverted into the sulphuretted hydrogen it was before the lime purified it in the process of manufacture. Do we need proof of it? Hang over the street gratings or on an up-turned pavement; watch the black earth surrounding every pipe, probably more noxious than the burnt candle snuff from which the advent of gas freed us.
The obvious remedy for this evil is to cease burying the pipes in loose earth, which only serves as a bad kind of “puddling,” and to prepare accessible channels wherein they can be examined from time to time, and repaired without disturbing the paving, and wherein they need not be taken up or disturbed, or have their joints broken by the vibration of the vehicles. This practice of burying our water and gas and sewage pipes in the ground in inaccessible darkness is an ancient ignorance unpardonable at the present day, involving costly waste and more costly disease.
But the great source of river and drain nuisance is the fæcal matter of our dwellings. This is divisible ​into fluids and solids. The solids are the fruitful source of poisonous gases, yet it is demonstrable that if the solids be kept from moisture they evolve no gas whatever. A large trade is carried on by drying them and packing them, most probably in the identical hogsheads which bring back sugar from the West India Islands, which receive this dried matter as manure. “Well,” said Lord Palmerston, “dirt is only matter in a wrong place.” That which is dirt in London, becomes sugar in the tropics. Of the value of these matters for purposes of manure, there has probably been much exaggeration; but of the importance of expending considerable sums on destroying or getting rid of them there can be no doubt, and against the cost of any newer or better methods there is always to be set the cost of the present system of sewers. If we can utilise them in value while destroying their noxious properties, so much the better; but the great consideration is how to destroy the nuisance.
On the pampas of southern temperate America, the prairies of northern temperate America, and in sundry table lands to boot, fuel of wood or coal is a very scarce commodity, and the chief resource of travellers is called “bosta” in the south, and “buffalo chips” in the north: it is, in short, dry animal manure. When in sufficient masses a pleasanter or better fire never warmed an Irish cabin on the edge of a peat moss. Here is an indication of one means of disposing of noxious matter, not polluting thousands of gallons of water in a vain attempt to move matter from one “wrong place” to another, but applying the universal cleanser, fire. Placed in close retorts as we use coal to distil gas, this matter also would distil gas almost identically the same, leaving as a cinder not gas coke but a more valuable article—animal charcoal. The whole question in this case is a different mechanical arrangement in our dwellings, not difficult to imagine or construct, separating fluids from solids—in short, a retort for a receptacle to which the application of gas or fuel in another form might be made at pleasure. The water-closet would become a fire-closet with chemical arrangements to fix the noxious gases. The chemical world is largely at work upon the process of deodorisation, and it will be accomplished. The chief error lies in trying to deodorise with a thousand-fold dilution. Let the chemists apply the deodorisers in small bulk, and the process becomes easy. It must be done house by house by a process simple and easy, within the servants’ control, and, in order to ensure success, yielding a perquisite to the servant in a similar mode to the grease-procuring process of the cook, and in such case it would never be neglected. If the value be anything like that assumed by the Chadwick school of water transit, it will be very largely increased by keeping it in the concrete state. Of the effects of water dilution we have examples in our river docks, which act as cesspools for twelve months together, and, in the summer, when the heat renders them unbearable, vomit forth their contents into the river.
We have another example in the town of Croydon, which, after a long experiment in Chadwickian pipe-drainage and enormous dilution, is washed tolerably clean, but can find no exit for its polluted waters, the authorities trying place after place, and being encountered by Chancery suits; at one time polluting the Wandle stream, but driven back thence, are now in despair of finding any outlet for their liquid manure, and the parish likely to be ruined in law. Why do they not deodorise? Probably because the huge bulk renders it impracticable.
Thus Croydon gives us on a small scale a foretaste of what is likely to be the result of the huge brick tubes leading to Erith.
Preventing the access of air and moisture is the true method. This may be done in many ways. There is one obvious method adapted to the sick room or the hospital which may probably be in use, but I am not aware of it. It is well known that flesh meat dried, and covered with peat or butter, may be preserved fresh for any length of time. If coal oil, or paraffin oil, Rangoon, or any of the hydro-carbons, natural or artificial, be floated on the surface of decomposing matter, it will arrest decomposition as surely as the Egyptian process of embalming dead bodies. And this oil, wholesale, scarcely exceeds in value one shilling per gallon. It would therefore be practicable to use it in dwellings in small quantities instead of the enormous water dilution.
The water idolaters will scoff at all this, and ask how all the dwelling arrangements in London are to be changed to meet these conditions? Our answer would be, has not a large alteration from cesspools and distributing pits to water dilution already taken place? and how? Simply by making a commencement—setting a pattern. Getting rid of the dilution is a much more easy thing than creating the dilution, for it gets rid of the underground complication. There is amongst house-agents a standing jest about a lady, who “wanted a house without a drain.” There was more common sense in her words than probably she herself dreamed of. She really wanted to get rid of underground “black ditches” as well as those on the surface.
It is not every town that is blessed with a Thames. Birmingham, for instance. Birmingham is a town of cesspools, but Birmingham has always been free from cholera. After their fashion they mix coal dust and cinders with excreta, so that a clumsy partial deodorisation takes place, and the matter is put in a right place, i. e., on the land. Moses in the olden time enacted that every man should have a spade on the end of his spear to dig and cover up nuisances in the camp.
But how to destroy or render harmless the excreta of all London is the question before us. Not in a single day can it be dealt with, nor in many days; but a beginning might be made. An individual might try a single house; a building company might try a number of houses, induced thereto by the consideration of getting rid of sewers rates for all time. If the legislature would consent to this compromise, and the fact were once demonstrated, the process would spread without much trouble.
There are localities where the experiments could be fittingly made: for example, the camp at ​Aldershott—a town in miniature without a river, and in a comparatively primæval condition. It could there be ascertained whether it is not practicable, by the dry chemistry of fire, and at very moderate cost, utterly to destroy the nuisance, while leaving a marketable residuum of little bulk and easy transport—this as regards the solids. As regards the liquids: undiluted, there would be little difficulty in dealing chemically with them, extracting the valuable salts, and suffering the innoxious filtered liquid to flow away. This would be a valuable boon from a government to a nation, putting “matter in the right place,” and showing that what holds good of a camp or a temporary town holds good also of a city or permanent town.
There are four methods to try:—First, to destroy the nuisance by fire. Secondly, to neutralise it by chemical action. Thirdly, to inclose in oil or analogous material, so as to exclude the atmosphere. Lastly, to keep the solids and liquids apart in all cases, and to cease from multiplying the evil by enormous dilution, the results of which we experience in the condition of the Thames.
As regards immediate action, we must pay the penalty of our ignorance in converting the Thames into a cesspool. In the blue books of the Board of Health the sewers were denominated “elongated cesspools.” Under diluvian guidance the Thames has become an open black ditch for the reception of their contents, blocked up by the incessantly returning tide—the protest of the ocean against pollution.
Nature helps us. With the thermometer at 80°, the acetous fermentation of the river commences, and goes on to the putrefactive, converting into unsavoury but warning gases the excreta lying in the channel of the river, and so the nuisance is gradually carried away by the atmosphere. If the warm weather lasted long enough each summer, and the supply of matter were cut off, the Thames would become pure, as it does in casks or tanks on shipboard,—horrible to every sense while the fermenting process is going on, but pronounced by all skippers frequenting the Thames harbour as the finest water in the universe when the gases are thrown off and the no longer fermentable mud subsides to the bottom—a thing almost incredible to those who have not witnessed it.
And yet some millions are to be given to engineers to expend in huge high tunnels to form a temporary safety-valve for London, while chemists and engineers are studying the processes which will ultimately render the tunnels useless, after a plentiful crop of litigation on the part of the inhabitants of the outfall regions—the present Croydon process on a gigantic scale. Well; we are a rich nation, and prefer the impracticable methods which we call practical to logical inference leading to probable experimental verification. We prefer arriving at the processes that will do by going in succession through all the processes that will not do.
It is not creditable to our common sense that it should be needful to discuss such a question in public journals. It was a maxim of the elder Bonaparte that “dirty linen should be washed at home.” That is, the dirt kept out of public view: but the nuisance has endured so long that, perforce, it must be talked of in public in order to get the public to understand it, and to enforce the needful change.
W. Bridges Adams.