The Sun.
London, England, 1851-08-20 00:00:00

" What are you doing, Join ?" said a master to
his servant. " Nothing, Sir." " And you, Tuomas ?"
" Helping JOHN, Sir" For the last two years the
Board of Health and the Board of Sewers have been
the JOHN and the Tnoseas of the British public. Tile'
excellent members of these Boards have talked
more diffusely than did, according to MUSTAPHA RUB
a- DUB KEELI KHAN, even the Congress of the United
States of America ; they have reported upon all ima-
ginable subjects, recommended the adoption of all
sorts of plans, possible and impossible, discoursed as
learnedly on stinks as though they had studied the
subject practically in the city of Cologne, where, ac-
cording to SAMUEL TAYLUH COLERIDGE, seventy-
six distinct and separate stinks may be discovered by
even an uneducated nose, in the course of
a walk of half a mile ; they have told us we were poi-
soned by the foulness of our drains, poisoned by the
foulness of the water supplied to us by the water corn-
' panics, stifled in consequence of the ill-ventilated
state of our habitations ; they have reported all this
and much more, and then re-reported and then re-
published the re• report in another form, but they
have absolutely done nothing. Those filthy cesspools
and choked drains, which two years since we were
told had, if not produced, at least aggravated, the
cholera, which was at that time raging to a fearful
extent, still continue as filthy and as choked
as though no Board of Health had ever de-
nounced them. The Thames, which ought
to be a source of health to the inhabitants
living on its banks, by supplying them with an in-
exhaustible supply of pure water and of pure air, is
a filthy polluted stream of stinking sewage, generat-
ing malaria through its whole course, and propagat-
ing pestilence as it goes along. The water supplied
by the water companies, which two years since was
declared by the Board of Health to be unfit for use,
and in many cases absolutely poisonous, is still sup-
plied in quantities as scanty, and of quality as delis-
terious ; and here we have the cholera again making its
appearance, and finding us quite as unprepared to resist
its attacks as we were two years since, notwithstanding
the Bard of Health, which declared at the time that
cholera was a disease the approach of which might,
by the proper adoption of sanitary measures, be abso-
lutely prevented, has been sitting ever since, and has
had nothing to do but to devise measures for such
prevention. We have said the cholera is approach-
ing, and we found our statement upon the weekly re-
turn of the Regi-tray-General just published. The
deaths in London have risen from 873 in the third
week in July to 1,061 last week. In the correspond-
ing
week of 1849, when the cholera was at its height,
the deaths were 2,230, but the deaths during the last
week are more numerous than during any corres-
ponding week of the last ten years, with
the exception of the years 1847 and 1849. Of
these deaths 156 were from diarrhoea, which
has been progressively increasing for the last six
weeks, and 28 from cholera, which has also been
progressively increasing, from 9 six weeks since, up
to 28 last week. There is, perhaps, no occasion for
immediate alarm ; and if the Board of Health did its
duty, and exercised the power which it possesses, of
insisting on the pr per drainage of houses and on the
immediate closing of all the metropolitan graveyards,
the probability is that we should have no very serious in-
ert'," of the ragitiltuce but whilst the Board of Health