The Sun.
London, England, 1849-11-07 00:00:00

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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1849.

Her MAJESTY has been pleased to appoint Thurs-
day, the 15th of November instant to be set apart as
a day of National Thanksgiving to ALMIGHTY GOD to
manifest " our deep and devout sense of His late
mercies in having abated the grievous disease with
which many places in this kingdom have been lately
visited ;" and her MAJESTY has done well in so ap-
pointing such day of Thanksgiving. But her MA•
JRSTY'S Ministers, and the members of the Legislative,
Assemblies of the', nation, will not have done their;'
duty to the nation at large, nor will the
members of the various Municipal Assemblies,
to whom the Government of various localities has
been entrusted have done their duty to those who
are committed to their charge, if they content them-
selves with merely returning thanks to ALMIGHTY
GOD for the abatement of the pestilence, without at
the same time adopting measures which shall prevent
its return. Unless such measures of prevention
be adopted, and adopted without delay, we shall have
the pestilence raging among us in the spring
with tenfold virulence; and for the deaths which
may then occur, those must be held responsible
who shall have neglected to adopt the precautionary
measures which they might have adopted, and who
will not then be permitted blasphemously to arraign
DIVINE PROVIDENCE as the cause of that misery
which will have arisen solely from their own culpable
neglect. Aide toi, Dieu folder(' holds true in pesti-
lence as well as in politics, and it is a mere blas-
phemous mockery to offer up prayers to Heaven for
the abatement or removal of a pestilence whilst we
neglect to adopt measures for the removal of
those causes which experience has pointed out as the
never failing producers of disease. We would,
therefore, recommend to the careful perusal of every
person who is interested in this question (and every
person who may at any time be liable to an attack of
cholera is interested in it), the excellent and ela-
borate annual report of Mr. Sistorr, the officer of
Health of the City of Loodpn, presented by that
gentleman yesterday to the City Commissioners of

Sewers.
Mr. SIMON, in this most important document, goes
fully into the investigation of the causes which
" tend to produce the present high rate of mortality
in the city of London, and to suggest how, by other
and better sanitary arrangements, our present high
rate of mortality may be diminished. He divides
his observations under the following heads :
" I. Defective house drainage.
" 11. Incomplete and insufficient water-supply.
" 111. Offensive or injurious trades and occupations.
" IV. Intramural burials.
" V. Houses insusceptible of ventilation,:and abso-
tolutely unfit for ventilation.
" VI. The personal habits of the lowest classes, and
the influence of destitution in increasing their mortality.
In considering the subject of defective drainage,
Mr. SIMON draws the attentionof the Commissioners
to the fact :that there are still in the city of Lon-
don several thousand houses which are not drained
at all, houses in which the filth is collected in a
cesspool which lies actually within the four walls of
the inhabited house ; the latter reared over it, as a
bell-glass over the beak of a retort, receiving and
sucking up incessantly the unspeakable abomination
of its volatile contents. In some such instances, where
the basement story cf the house is tenanted, the
cesspool lies—perhaps merely boarded over—close
beneath the feet of a family of human beings, whom
it surrounds uninterruptedly, whether they wake or
sleep, with its fetid pollution and poison.
Mr. Simms goes on to say—
" Now, here is a removable cause of death. These
gases which so many thousands of persons are daily in-
haling do not, it is true, in their diluted condition, sud-
denly extinguish life; but, though different in concen-
tration, they are identically the same in nature with that
confined sewer-gas which, on a recent occasion, at
Pimlico, killed those who were exposed to it with the
rapidity of a lightning stroke. In their diluted state, as
they rise from so many cesspools and taint' the atmo-
sphere of so many houses, they form a climate the most
congenial for the multiplication of epidemic disorders,
and operate beyond all known influences of their class in
impairing the chances of life.
"It may be taken as an axiom for:the purposes of
sanitary improvement that every individual cesspool is
hurtful to its vicinage, and it may hence be inferred how
great an injury is done to the public health by their
existence in such numbers, that parts of the city might
be described as having a cesspool-city excavated be-
neath it,"

Experience has shown us that it is ',worse than
useless, it is positively absurd, to trust to
the philanthropy or the wisdom of the proprietors
of houses for the removal of theee cesspools ; the
Board of Health and the Commissioners of Sewers
are, we fear, too slow in theiCoperations, and we
would suggest that, in order to get rid of the
nuisance effectually, a short Act of Parliament should
be passed, enacting that, after a certain and not very
distant day, every proprietor of a house should be
liable to a penalty of 101. a-day for every day
during which he should suffer a cesspool
to exist on his premises, such penalty to
be recovered by summoning such proprietor
before a magistrate—one-half of the said penalty
so recovered to go to the informer, and the
t.l-1117t
half to the poor of the parish; and that in all
i---Z:V7 .
ses ikwhich a cesspool exiAts on the premises the
4. '6-) rilluit:/ shall be absolved from all liability for rent
/v.\ '76' - : cl% cesspool shall be removed. This measure
1- -." ':'fro ' think, in the shortest possible space of
141.6.
, . -.1
--, _
~: :- ,
_ tlpite-,, pd of the nuisance of cesspools.
/ -':,'‘,,".-/-‘lp.,,
,ffrssoN thus proceeds to comment on the evils
.4P ' iirist.* the exhalations emitted from the public
-- pother
..,..Zrtn
.---other most important desideratum in connexion
with the sewerage of the city is that, if possible, some