Los Angeles herald., 1892-10-20
AN AFFAIR OF THE HART.


OF our city and the attorney general of
this state, as given in our local columns,
is singular thing for our Republican
subscribers to read; and reading, to
reflect that their votes should ever have
called to the legal portfolio of the state,
man SO utterly incompetent as an
officer and SO wholly unreliable as a
man, as Attorney General Hart has
proven himself to be.
In the matter of his interference,
without solicitation and without war
rant, in the sewer bonds case, he will
find but few apologists in his own party
and none in the ranks of the opposition.
This outfall sewer matter is not polit-
ical question. Our most earnest advo-
Gates of Democracy stand shoulder to
shoulder, upon this question at least,
with men who voted for Abraham Lin
coin before the war. clouds lowered upon
the devoted battlements of Sumter.
An object lesson on this matter,
drawn from the great south continent,
may not be wholly amiss in this con-
nection. The water in the colonies of
Victoria and South Australia, is so far
below the surface of the earth that
malarial fevers, which prevail in the
San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys
during the summer months, are wholly
unknown there. But in the cities of
Melbourne and Adelaide, the scourge of
typhoid begins to rage with unparalleled
virulence at the first approach of sum-
mer. 9fas
Melbourne is still in the malodorous
condition peculiar to surface drainage,
but the citizens of Adelaide began a
step forward in 1885. The city pur-
chased tract of $40 acres from the
crown as a sewage farm, and built an
outfall sewer leading to it, with an inter-
nal system tributary to the outfall drain.
There are never more than 100 acres OF
the $40 on the sewage farm used at one
time as a receptacle of filth; and, as
consequence, the other 660 acres readily
rent at e3 per annum to Chinese
gardeners, paying the city over IL per
cent income on the cost of the land. In
the meantime the death rate of adelaide
has decreased from % per cent 10 1414
per cent, while Melbourne, the richest
city south of the equator, is struggling
against g death rate of "a.
It was with view of bringing about
results similar to those achieved in AIDE
laide that the citizens of Los Angeles,
already taxed heavily for other
needed local improvements, put their
shoulders to the wheel and voted to
incur a debt of 1896; 900 for the cole
purpose of maintaining the reputation
of Los Angeles az the healthiest of
American cities. OF what use is our
otherwise balmy air, if sewer gas is to
invade every home and the microbes of
diphtheria strangle our loved children ?
Therefore it is that our public-spirited
people have willingly bowed their shoul-
ders to righteous tax, in the hope of
continuing our prestige as health re-
sort; and it is chiefly as an obstruction
ist of this long-needed sanitary measure
that Attorney General Hart will be
hereafter best known to our people.
In the question of veracity between
himself and Councilman Nickel, of our
First ward, the attorney general must
take care of himself. We are neither
his assailant nor his apologist. But what
kind of a lawyer. and especially states
attorney is it, who, according to his own
admission, signs letter without know
ing it's contents? Considering his prom
inence in the affair, he has been be-
trayed into a most humiliating
confession.