The Sun. — 1859-08-23 (London, England)

THE EDITOR OF THE TIRES.  Sir,—On the case of the Serpentine much allowance may be claimed for Mr. Fitzroy, the new Commissioner of Works, for his unavoidably sudden determination, immediately on his accession to office, when he must have acted upon trust, upon advice, and upon what he might, from being uninformed on the specialities of the case, naturally deem competent authority. But, if you will permit me, I would submit to him whether he may not be properly asked to reconsider the question on a point which appears to me to be of primary importance, and yet not duly considered—namely, whether the prevention of the continued danger to thousands and the annual sacrifice of many lives in the Serpentine shall not be made an indispensable condition, as well as the purification of its water, of any plan on -which the public money is expended for its improvement. Sir Morton Peto says : " I reside near the Serpentine, and have a business establishment near St. James's-park. I have cultivated a habit of observation, and am somewhat accustomed to the consideration of public schemes of a practical character. I therefore hold myself to be entitled to express my opinion on these and other schemes submitted to tho Government either in the House of Commons or elsewhere."  I, too, hold myself entitled, on similar grounds, to express my opinions on such schemes, more especially on the one in question, from having had, as a Sanitary Commissioner, to take evidence bearing upon it. I, too, for years resided near the Serpentine, and for years had to repass it, morning and evening, in summer and winter. On those occasions I could not but be witness of the frequent action of the police of the Humane Society—in summer for the protection of bathers, in winter for the saving of skaters, and their dragging fcr the bodies of boys and men drowned, notwithstanding all the precautions,—at night seeing the watch kept upon solitary women or others wandering near the remoter spots, and by their motions apparently meditating suicide. Nor was it otherwise than painful to regard constantly, as part of the ornamental water, the deadhouse, with its apparatus for the treatment of the subjects rescued from preventible dangers, and the reception of the dead got out of the deep pools. Though the Serpentine is to be considered as a promenade fot the higher classes during the middle of the day, I submit that, for the early morning and the evening in the summer time, it is to be regarded as a great and most important public swimming bath, chiefly for boys, and in winter time as a great public skating place. In this point of view alone, as a matter of common humanity, 1 personally urged, ten years ago, as a Metropolitan Sanitary Commissioner, that the pools of water in St. James's Park as well as in the Serpentine should ba filled up to a height that would prevent the continued sacrifice of life. I cannot but regard it as a discreditable state of mind which, in dealing with the question responsibly, disregards as of no serious account in the question the terrors of many thousands of mothers and heads of families at real dangers to their children, as shown by the frequent fatal accidents and by the need of the maintenance of a special police for protection against them. As far as I can remember, it then appeared that the mere money score for the lives lost, and the various expenses attendant on the existing defective conditions of the place, could not be less on the average than between £lOOO and £2OOO works per annum, which, capitalized at 5 per cent. would, on that score alone, justify an outlay of from 30,000 to £40,000 for works of permanent Prevention ; and it then appeared also that the required for the saving of life were the best for the purification of the water—inasmuch as every cubic yard of material thrown into those pools diminished the quantity of water constantly required tooa freshenteyinertehaesedlakthee, the limited supply of fresh water As a v sanitary rioiyat hb el et• powerflvo rortdhose purpose. i. s it was not intended to raise towers or massive constructions on the bottom of the lake, no one conceived it to be necessary there, to remove any er and I believe considerable amount of the deposit that the contractors who tve offered to accom.plish the object of raising the bed may perform the contract within the estimates. The measure since successfully executed for raising the bed of the St. James's Canal and purifying it has been spoken of as one of my measures, but it is just to state that I believe it to have arisen on wholly independent considerations, and that the results  Sanitary Commission could not but concur in the conclusion thus expresse3 in our first report on the use of the names of eminent engineers by whom those works had been approved :—" Tha more the investigation advances, the more is it apparent that the progressive improvement and proper execution of this class of public works, together with the appliances of hydraulic engineering, cannot reasonably be expected to be dealt with incidentally or collaterally, to ordinary occupations or even to connected professional pursuits, but require a degree of special study which not only place them beyond the sphere of the discussions of popular administrative bodies, but beyond that of ordinary professional engineering and architectural practice. In justification of this conclusion, and to show the evil of the pervertel application of high general professional authority, we might adduce examples of the most defective works which have received their sanction."