The Sun.
London, England, 1857-02-23 00:00:00

"ditto" Fellows of the Royal Society. Others

of the 39 new local surveyors are provided with
subordinate clerks of works, clerks for drainage
works, and clerks of paving works---.. 30 that in
respect to staffs of officers little would appear to
be wanted but the proper direction of their ser-

vices in laying out the public work needed and
intended by the Legislature to be done.
Besides the abolition of cess-pools and the pre-
per drainage of between one and two hundred
thousand houses, there appears to be a vast

amount of branch drainage required, of which
little has yet been done. By the 87th section of
the new Act vestries and district boards

of works are enabled to fill up ditches
by the sides of roads, and substitute
pipes. It appears, by the second Report of the
Metropolitan Sanitary Commissioners, that there
are in the Surrey and Kent districts nearly 70
miles of open ditches, amounting to upwards of
60 acres of superficial surface, mostly of sewerage.
to reference to the marshes east of Greenwich,
one witness, a surveyor, states :—" I fiud, upon
an area of 450 acres of land, there are 13 miles
of ditches. The surface of the water in these
ditches averages nine feet in width. The entire
water surface is, therefore, 15 acres. The

average of the entire width of the ditches is 11 to
i
12 feet wide ; there is, thus, 18 acres of land

occupied with ditches out of 450, or one acre of
ditch to 24 acres of land."
We should be glad to learn how much of this
has been touched. The steady prevalence of the
diseases of "fermentation," the zymotic class, and
the high death rate, which distinguishes the low-
lying urban districts of Xent and Surroy, too
strongly corroborates the assumption that the
great mass of these and other cesspool nuisances
remains untouched. In the whole of the metro-
politan districts it appears from a proximate
return there are 400 miles of open sewers to be
(Leah with; but dealing with them by covering
them is proved to be only covering cesspools and
masking evil. Besides these open sewers there
are the great mass of covered sewers of deposit,
which are for the most part only extended and
pestilential ',cesspools, to be dealt with. Of the
sewers of this description 658 miles have been ex-
amined, and 150 miles unexplored. The length
of the streets and roads of the metropolis appear
to be now between 1,500 and 1,600 miles. The
reports of the old sewers examined display far
worse than waste extended reservoirs of
pestilential matter detained and spread,
which such constructions ought to remove—
works of very recent construction, on which
large amounts of ratepayers' money have been
expended, already in ruin. Of the self-cleans-
ing description of new tubular sewers only
126 miles are constructed, or in course of con-
struction. The manufacture of the new tubular
sewers is stated to be proceeding is Lambeth at
the rate of fifty miles a week, but the consump-
tion appears to be chiefly for the provincial towns
under the Public Health Act, and not for the me-

tropolis.
We have spoken only of the extent of drainage
work available. Let auy one who leaves London
by the South-Western Railway look down to the
left as the train approaches Vauxhall, and he
may have an example, and that by no means
one of the worst, of the condition of the surfaces
of a large proportion of the suburban streets
occupied by the poorer Glasses, who are paying
rents, amounting to eight, twelve, and fourteen
per cent. on the original cost of the construction
of their wretched dwellings.
Enough has been said to show the extent of
beneficial public work needed for the sanitary im-
provement of the metropolis, and that much of it
is of a character, as earth work, suitable for the
employment of labourers of the lowest class, who
form the largest proportion of those who are now
unemployed. We have justified the application
of this work on administrative principle; on which
we have further to obseive, that no relief ought to
be given except in return for labour at task-work.
Roads must be made or repaired, and stones must
be broken to repair them. The objection to
handle the hammer for this purpose is an objec-
tion of beggars and impostors, and ought not to
be listened to from able-bodied labourers.
Stone-breaking is good work for the purpose
whilst there is no better to be had, but, in pro-
portion, as better work is to be had, stone-break-
ing becomes obnoxious to the objection stated in
the dicta of the Commissioners above recited,,and
ought to be put aside for other occasions, when
there are not so many labourers of the class of
artisans unemployed.
Emigration, at the public expense, is suggested
by some of our contemporaries as a means of
relief. But emigration at the public expense can
•
only be legitimately applied as a means for the
relief of a labour market, which is burthened
with labourers who arelpermanently redundant,
and there is no redundancy whilst such a mass of
necessary and beneficial labour remains to be pro-
vided by the local board,, if they do their duty to
any reasonable extent. Indeed we should quite
expect, that as task work is laid out, at such
wages as will insure only a bare subsistence—
such wages as can only
be given correctly as pub-
lic relief in return for task work, the redundancy
will disappear, and work at better wages be found
by the operatives with the coming spring and
summer, and that the officers will be obliged to
raise the wages to the common market rate, or to
the former general level, to get the work com-
pleted.