WATER SUPPLY OF TOWNS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1415, 20 June 1865, Page 3

WATER SUPPLY OF TOWNS.

(From the Times, March 24.) I We ought all to be much obliged to a nobleman who undertakes a task so disagreeable as only to be redeemed by its - absolute necessity. Such a man deserves favour at our hands, and should be met with no objections that are not themselves as inevitable as the work to be done. Lord Robert Montagu has the courage to üße his senses, and go forth and spy, or smell out, the filthiness of the land. Two out of our five senses, besides the pleasure they bring, have no other use than to give us warnings of the very evils which Lord Robert denounces. We taste, and reject the contents of the glass, whatever the colour of the contents or however colourless. We smell, and we turn our backs on the watercourse as yellow as the Tiber, or the Pactolus itself. What should we do in London without taste or smell? Without these we might be poisoned, and infected even in the best houses, in , the most fashionable and most airy quarters. As to the progress of pollution, we can answer for many a sad deterioration which less than half a century of observation can bear witness to. In one place there 1 used to be banks of willow and hazel, and a numerous family of kmg fishers, and very good angling, where now you may smell the brook some yards underground. The rapids, sixty yards across, that used to show every pebble, and where we have seen fly-fishing, and something to show for it, must not be revisited if we would wish to cherish sweet memories. Styx ltselt cannot be blacker. The broad sheet ot water, backed by the weir, which used to reflect in its calm mirror, spire and tower and tree, bubbles and creams with scum—scum strange and unaccountable, scum of shambles and stables, scum of tanyards and dyeing-houses, scum of gasworks and colourworks, scum vegetable, animal, and metallic; scum of man and beast and creeping thing, lhe " Ancient Mariner" never saw anything so dreadful. Try to escape it. Walk for miles through the fields, and come on to the river in its solitude, up or down from the town or take the rail and go higher up to the moor-side, or the rocky chaßm where the gtream is still youthful and ought to be pure. ' You find it red, or black, or all the colours of the rainbow, or like ft London gutter after a shower, according to the last " works " it passed by. With Izaak Walton for your guide, and the best tackle London can supply, you cannot even find a barbel. Smaller streams, where you once Baw boys tickling trout, have ceased to exist. I " Where do the people get water to "drinfer

you nsk. Well, happily the case i>not so hopeless. If you really wish to know the modern substitute you are directed to a great fabric, with an engine-house, a chimney, a water-tower, and a reservoir, and you find that a good supply of water is obtained there for the town, but not enough for the increasing population and its increasing wants Last summer, you are told, there were loud complaints. The roads were not watered as they should have been ; the houses had only water " on" an hour at a time, twice a week ; the manufacturers who had not wells of their own stormed aud raved; the new streets could not have water laid on ; and, on one or two occasions, when a fire broke out, it had its own way. Half a century has done this, and the latter part of this half has probably done three times as much as the former half; so that the mischief is increasing " as the square of the time," and it is fearful to contemplate our case at the end of the century. Indeed, already a large part of the population can no more pretend to have seen a " rivulet " of pure water than a stream of liquid lava, or an Icelandic geyser, or a river of milk and honey, or a glacier, The thing is passing away into the days of fable and the Golden Age, and in a century or two a courageous thinker will write a book to prove that there never was a stream of pure water —and could not be—in this island, at least. The certainty is so inevitable that we must console ourselves for it, and bear what we cannot help. Mr. Brigbt's comfort is briefly expressed elsewhere. —" Where no oxen are the crib is clean ; but much increase is by the strength of the ox." You cannot drain mines and puddle the ore without spoiling the water for salmon, but the livelihood of several hundred poor fellows and their families is a matter of more consequence than the amusement of a few sportsmen and the supply ofafew unnecessary dishes." All the nuisance complained of represents an immense population, immense industry, and immense improvement in certain sanitary respects. It is clear, however, that we only stave off the evil. We are passing it on one to another, and woe to him upon whom it is last found. London is the great sufferer, for, as it appears, 800,000 ingenious neighbours have passed on to it what they did not like to keep at home. They think that when anything is thrown into a river, there is an end of it; but nature cannot be so cheated, nor must she be overtaxed.

But it is a question of time. .-It takes time to change tack, and the tack we are now on is the old maxim of every man —that is, every town for itself. The tack to which Lord Robert invites us is the Imperial line of looking after the entire water supply of these islands, every mountain rill, every watershed. His measure is simply for the utilization of town sewage ; but his speech was quite as much on the pollution of water before it reaches the towns, and that by mill refuse as well as by sewage. Town sewage is all we can attend to just now, and this is a matter affected by other bills in hand, besides Acts already in force and experiments already in operation. In a few years, not to say months, we hope to see our way more clearly to the useful and profitable conversion of that which we now allow to remain in its original state as the poison of millions. Any measure to comprehend immense watersheds of several thousand square miles, and, indeed, the whole island, and to create an entirely new water code and water administration, must wait till we see something like stepping-stones to so great $ change. Meanwhile we cannot help thinking that the metropolis and our other great towns will have to look in the face the great fact of the pollution and deterioration of all the surface water in the more populous parts of the island. For drinking purposes there can be no insuperable difficulty. The clouds, if not the earth, will everywhere supply enough for every living being on the surface, if the water be properly preserved and economically used. No population can be so dense as not to draw from the skies as much as life requires. Washing, watering, draining, and manufacturing are another affair, and tor most of these purposes we do not require water as pure as it trickles through the heather on its passage from a mountain tarn. But even in the supply of surface water London has not done what it can. It has trusted to the Thames till it has to fight hard for the few gallons draining from a pump trough in a farmyard near Cheltenham. It has made no reservoirs of many hundred acres for even the hoarding of this one supply. It has almost drained the Thames dry, and hardly look around for a reserve in time of need. It will only learn by experience, and some very painful experience appears to be at hand.