Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1872 [PAGE 219]

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215 repaired. Meantime the servant brought the water from a spring at the foot of the hill, which soon became low owing to the drought. He then resorted to a small brook, and from this source the family was supplied for two or three weeks. This stream, higher up, ran through several farm yards and received the surface drainage. The first'symptoms of poison by water was slight nausea and a mild diarrhoea ; after several days a typhoid fever in its worst form was ushered in. Of the entire family but two escaped an attack, and they did not use the water. An examination of this water revealed a sediment of excremental matter." Many of you, no doubt, would assure me there is no danger, in your case; that your cess-pool is at a distance from the well and house; that its location is much lower, etc. Do not deceive yourselves 5 the contour of the surface of the ground gives little or no indication of the veins and arteries below, that convey the water to your well. Any of you no doubt can call to mind facts which will bear me out in this statement. The water carriage system of sewerage is the only one that provides for the stops and surface drainage as well as excrements. It has much in its favor when carried out as is now being done in England, but as it existed in Eome in ancient times, and in the cities and towns of Europe until within a few years, and in this country still, is better than the cess-pool, but not what is required $ not what our civilization, in other respects, demands. Its aims were purely sanitary, but were not far reaching. The location, only, of the trouble was changed. The filth was removed from Eome, only to pollute the waters of the Tiber. Some of the fairest portions of the shores of the Mediterranean sea, once as healthful as any in the world, are now uninhabitable, because of the complete pollution of the water and air by the sewerage of cities and towns. Many locations in England were, less than ten years ago, on the open road to a like condition. Some of the rivers were so polluted by the sewerage of the towns that a high authority stated, at a sanitary meeting, he had seen birds cross a river upon the filth collected on the surface of the water. At last the strong arm of the law interposed making it criminal to empty sewers into certain rivers, or their tributaries within three miles of the main ones. Even before this, public opinion had condemned the water carriage system as thus carried out, and demanded to some extent a return to the cess-pool. Mr. Eawlinson, before referred to, said in 1864: "The improved sanitary condition of some of our cities and towns may be thoroughly investigated, and the question be again asked * Shall we return to cess-pools V The modern sewering of towns and drainage of houses has, no doubt, led to the fouling of streams and rivers; but, and this must be fully considered, the value of human life has been increased in proportion as cess-pool and cess-pit have been abolished and water-closet refuse has been removed in water."