# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/The restoration of our soil - Part 1

Part 2→
THE RESTORATION OF OUR SOIL.
PART I.
The “Times” startled its readers the other day by stating, on the authority of some great names in the domain of chemistry, that the vegetable mould of Europe was gradually becoming exhausted—that our system of farming was, in fact, drying up the source of our daily bread, and that our over-stimulated fields required to revert to their primal condition of wood, and forest, and bog, to bring them back to a wholesome state of fertility. This was tantamount to saying that civilisation was at an end, and that we must look up our old books of costume to see how we should look once more tatooed in woad and draped with skins.
We do not happen to know whether Dr. Cumming has attempted to improve the occasion, by launching forth another of his prophetic visions—possibly not, as the evidence tends to show that man must begin afresh, instead of finally closing his account with nature: be that as it may, the statement was somewhat calculated to attract attention, and one not in the usual run of penny-a-lining.
Fortunately, it happened that not long before this communication was made to the “Times,” the Queen’s printers were issuing what we venture to predict will prove one of the most important Blue Books ever published, to wit, the “Second Report of the Select Committee on Sewage of Towns.” It must have struck every thinking mind with wonder, that while our farmers were depending upon the refuse of flocks of birds in the islands of the South Pacific, and upon the bleaching bones gathered from distant battle-fields,—the refuse of man himself lay decomposing beneath his feet in great cities, and giving forth exhalations which poisoned him in his own household. “Surely,” the reflecting man ​must have said, “the excreta of birds which feed upon a limited range of food cannot be so rich in manurial qualities as that of the human race within whose alimentary range all the edible products of earth are brought.” The thought was so simple, and withal so true, that he felt almost inclined to place it among the class of grand principles which are very well to enunciate, but which are difficult to reduce to practice. At all events, for years the public mind has done little more than dwell upon the problem, whilst those interested in our imported and manufactured manures have been active in throwing discredit upon the idea, whilst they have been equally active in despatching fleets to the other side of the globe to fetch guano, and factories have been arising on every hand to mix composts infinitely inferior to that mixed for us in our house drains, and which Lord Palmerston has truly designated as only matter in the wrong place. Whilst vested interests, however, have to a certain extent smothered the general idea floating in the public mind, and while, indeed, some public experiments, such as those at Rugby and Croydon, conducted on false principles, tended to discourage the belief in the new-found treasure, the efforts of individual minds have restored the problem to its original position.
With Englishmen an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory; and when men began to see, here and there throughout the island, fields producing four and five crops of grass a year of astounding weight and quality, and when the land itself became quadrupled in value, it was natural to inquire how the thing was done. Inquiry once stimulated, the battle was won; and now that a Parliamentary Committee have reported highly favourably of the agricultural value of the excreta of man in great cities, we think we may safely predict that in England, at all events, the time is near at hand when we shall no longer trouble the booby and other sea-fowl in the South Pacific Ocean. It is certainly a most remarkable fact, that when we have to announce any new discovery, or to refer to any ancient one which has greatly affected mankind, we have to acknowledge the Chinese as the earliest originators. Printing, gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and half a dozen other great inventions were well known in the flowery land long before this island had emerged from barbarism. But it seems stranger still to add that the simple expedient by which one of the largest empires—counting upwards of 400,000,000 inhabitants—possesses, and has possessed for hundreds of generations, the most productive soil in the world, should only just now be known amongst our sharper-witted farmers. If, according to a new theory, a slow exhaustion of the vegetable mould were really going on, we ought certainly to look to China for the strongest evidence of the fact; but mother earth is as strong there, possibly stronger, than she has been for a couple of thousand years, and the secret of this eternal vigour lies in this, that the inhabitants never fail to return to the soil those materials that they have taken out of it. Every morning the market gardener, who brings the day’s supply of vegetables, takes away the sewage of the house. It may not seem very savoury to our ideas to find the produce and the producer thus nakedly and perpetually brought into contact before our eyes; but it is in this rapid circulation of the fertilising agent that the whole secret of the wonderful productions of this vast empire is based. The western nations build magnificent cities which they undermine with a vast swamp of filth;—hence the plagues of the middle ages, which, like sudden floods, depopulated cities, and the slow fevers, which at the present day make their constant lairs in our crowded courts and alleys.
We have had constant intercourse with China for upwards of a hundred years, but it is only lately that travellers have made us acquainted with this one great feature in their industrial life, which doubtless lies at the foundation of a civilisation which reaches without intermission long before the so-called Historic period.
But we must not be surprised at our blindness to foreign example, when we find that we have equally shut our eyes to an experiment that has been going on for upwards of two hundred years in our own island. When the advantage of sewage manure is referred to, the Craigintenny meadows, near Edinburgh, are named as the exemplar. At present, there are upwards of two hundred acres irrigated with the flow of the sewage of about 80,000 of the population. This land receives the sewage from the western part of the city, and after flowing over the meadows it falls into the sea. Some portion of this pasture, being in fact little better than a prolongation of the sea-beach, was originally worth five shillings an acre—it is now worth 30l. an acre. This transmutation of desert land into pasture, off which as many as five crops have been taken in a year, yielding on some extraordinary occasions upwards of sixty tons per acre at one cutting, but averaging say twenty-five tons, is accomplished at an expense to the proprietor of not more than one pound per acre for the labour in irrigating. This process is very simple; the sewage flows by its own gravity over the whole surface, not continuously, but at certain seasons, and in certain conditions of the Italian rye grass crops, each acre receiving about 9000 tons at each watering, which takes place about ten or twelve times a year. It must be admitted that the extraordinary success of these meadows is owing to the favourable lie of the land, which prevents the necessity for pumping arrangements; but there are scores of towns in England as favourably situated as Edinburgh for delivering their sewage at a mere nominal expense. Yet this extraordinary example has been in some unaccountable manner overlooked. It is just possible that the vast amount of sewage per acre here employed has tended to make agriculturists doubt the possibility of applying this kind of manure profitably in other places; but there is no necessity for these heavy dressings, they are employed on these meadows as a matter of necessity rather than of choice, for the sewage must be got rid of, and this can only be done by passing it over the land into the sea. The great value of the present Report is the conclusion it comes to, that light dressings at infrequent intervals succeed admirably. The importance of this fact cannot be too highly ​estimated, for the whole value of the sewage of towns, when it has to be carried any distance, depends upon the cost of distribution, especially in those cases where there is a necessity for pumping, in order to raise it to a high level, that it may flow by its own gravity to distant parts. It must be evident that to distribute superfluous water is to clog the experiment with destructive charges. How to get rid of this superfluous water, which so deteriorates the value of town sewage, is the great question of the day. Sir Joseph Paxton, in his valuable evidence, believes the time will come when every house will have its hermetically sealed tank, into which all the sewage proper of the house will flow. This tank he would ventilate by carrying an half-inch pipe from it up the chimney. That by this means all the unpleasant odour would be got rid of, he proves by the fact, new perhaps to our readers, that in this manner, all the sewage of the Crystal Palace now deposited in tanks at the ends of the south transepts is ventilated through the pillars of the building, without the slightest odour being discovered, whilst the splendid bloom of the geraniums is the result of the sewage itself. As to the method of emptying these house-sewage tanks, he says:
I can see a time, and I believe I could scheme it, if I could turn my entire attention to it, by which you would have in your cellar a glazed iron tank, and a small half-inch pipe running up the chimney for the ventilation of this tank; and you would have a pipe going to the outside with a top screwed on, and a locomotive engine with a large tank would go down your street, and they would hook on this, and they would draw out in three minutes all that you had got in the tank, without your even knowing anything about it, or having the slightest possible smell in the house.
With all due deference to Sir Joseph Paxton, we think it will be a very distant day before we shall scent his odorous locomotive at our doors, for the simple reason, that to employ a pump at every door, whilst one pump in the suburbs would answer every purpose, would be economically absurd. Sir Joseph, however, was right in recognising the fact that we are destroying the sewage of our great towns by mixing it in our underground culverts with the rainfall.
To one of the members of the late Commission of Sewers the credit is principally due of pointing out this initial error, whilst battling manfully against Mr. Bazalgette’s monstrous sewers, so constructed as to swamp the excreta of the town in the drainage of the rainfall of metropolitan area, which extends over fifty-nine and a half square miles, and pours into the sewers from 80,000,000 to 90,000,000 of tons of water annually—a scheme which threatens to starve the river, and undoubtedly spoils the excreta of 3,000,000 of people. As far as we can see, there can be no denying the truth of his formula—
The whole of the rainfall is due to the river, the whole of the sewage to the soil.
This proposition he proposed to carry out by maintaining the then existing sewers for their original purpose, the carrying off the surface drainage to the river; whilst the pipe water, enriched by the cleansing of our dwellings, he would collect in pipes, carry out of town, and apply to the land. The millions that have been spent in constructing the colossal system of drainage now being carried out in the metropolis may seem to preclude the construction of this double system, and to destroy the possibility of saving the untold wealth it is planned to throw into the sea; but it is just possible that the metropolitan sewage may be intercepted at the mouth of each house drain, and carried, by means of earthenware pipes, through the great drains themselves. The house sewage and the refuse surface water flowing, like the vein and the artery in the human body, in the same enveloping sheath,—the one to afford splendid crops from exhausted fields, the other to supply a full flow to the Thames.
At all events, if such a scheme is impossible of accomplishment, we trust that the much-vaunted metropolitan drainage scheme will serve as an example to be avoided, rather than followed, by other towns, now that the value of sewage, not too much diluted, is placed beyond all dispute.
It certainly does seem extraordinary that in England, where economy of carriage is so well understood, that persons should fall into the fatal mistake of carrying that which can be made to carry itself. Thus, at Manchester, upwards of 100,000 tons of night-soil, mixed with 36,000 tons of ashes—the deodorising agent used in that town—are taken away annually by railroad into Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire, at a great expense, and in a very objectionable form, for this solid manure is for ever giving off its most valuable constituent, the ammonia. But why trouble the wheels of the locomotive, when an iron pipe, at a slight incline, will carry the sewage in a far less objectionable manner? Again, at Chatham, the farmers, notwithstanding their familiarity with the cheapness of hydraulic power, send to the town, and buy the night-soil of the contractors, which the latter carry for them in waggons. At Hyde, in Lancashire, a company is formed for conveying the sewage in a solid state, and has erected spacious premises for converting it into poudrette,—a process which nature has to undo before the manure is available for the use of the plant, as water is essential to carry it to the roots. A field, however thickly dressed with the best guano, whether home-made or Peruvian, can only obtain the advantage of it after a shower of rain, without which, indeed, the plants would be starved, just as a man would be in the best-stocked larder, provided he were chained by the leg out of reach of the tempting food hung around him.
These clumsy and needless methods of carrying and manufacturing an article which is already manufactured to hand in the best possible form, are not only conclusive of the ignorance which obtains with respect to the proper method of using it, but of its inherent worth. If town sewage can be made a paying commodity after thus being converted into a manufactured article, how much more profit could be made out of it by allowing it to flow immediately it is produced, when rich with all its volatile constituents, from our houses on to our fields.