74 



KE. K. ANGUS SMITH ON ANCIENT AND 



towns, and works, without making any extensive change in 

 the water-closet system essential, but to make it complete 

 that change is essential. The mode of building here offers 

 many advantages in a sanitary point of view ; the houses are 

 low, they occupy a great deal of space. But if that space be 

 not clean, of what advantage is it ? A yard behind a house 

 may be made an agreeable spot, but we do make them by no 

 means agreeable or wholesome. There is scarcely a row of 

 houses to be found where the backs are not actually unplea- 

 sant, not to say disgusting, to look at ; it is, in fact, the habit 

 of the country to have the backs of the houses filthy more or 

 less, generally damp, and instead of a place for play or for 

 air, mere nuisances. No one living in a town can, with the 

 smallest degree of satisfaction, look out at his bedroom window 

 at the back of the house. It is not wholesome to leave the 

 window down, and it is also unwholesome to put it up. 



The wide-spread streets and small houses in Manchester 

 might be made the most wholesome residences, by adopting a 

 plan long recommended by the Board of Health, and which 

 is now past a mere opinion. I have seen it abundantly tried 

 in Scotland, where, in a country which has suffered from 

 being behind in cleanliness, an effort has been made which is 

 likely to put them a good deal in advance. There, however, 

 the great disadvantage of living in flats has to be overcome, — 

 a very great one, 1 believe, and one which I am sorry has 

 been adopted in model houses in London. Such houses never 

 appear to me to be so well ventilated ; there is the large space 

 of the staircase wanting, and there is its ventilating power in 

 sweeping from below up to every room and through every 

 window. But they are adopting the water-closets even in 

 small houses of ten or twelve pounds rent, and they are 

 gaining the advantage. The yard behind is kept clean, and 

 clothes may be dried in it ; it is not, as before, a place to be 

 actually feared. To the water-closet they have added a bath, 

 and over it a shower-bath ; the whole is compactly placed 



