244 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



ft 



bred in their own disordered vitals. New York solemnly tells 

 Chicago of "the lower classes" that *'will not go to any kind of 

 decent dwellings so long as they can resort to the dens which now 

 contain them,"* 



There is poetic justice in this punishment of one wicked gener- 

 ation by another which every honest descendant of the old Indian- 

 fighting, rum-distilling, Puritanic race, must philosophically accept. 



We die, but slowly, however, as the Indian did. Though we 

 shake fit to snap our boots off and burn with feverish fires, the 

 putrid stream device for poisoning the old, open-air people, is very 

 slow, uncertain, and unsatisfactory. 



Before we get through I want to show you that the method is a 

 very old one. Chewing dirt to spit in the face of friend or foe 

 has been tried before and failed, utterly, over and over again, 

 causing a degeneration of human taste at last, intimately below 

 our starting-point in a savage equilibrium among healthy animals 

 and men. 



"The cloacae of Rome," says Liebig, "absorbed all the well- 

 being of the Roman peasant." Says Victor Hugo — "When the 

 Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome ex- 

 hausted Italy, and when she had put Italy into her cloacae she 

 poured Sicily in, then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome 

 engulfed the world." 



Ko novelist has undertaken yet to write the order and sequence 

 in wh.ich our bankrupt states have gone, or are going, into the 

 hopper. The matter is too fresh for a market novelty. Current 

 history holds its discreet nose but never says anything while this 

 nursery of all robberies is going on. 



Has not the .conflict between civilization and its own waste 

 always been a losing game for the world, from the tower of Babel 

 down to the last village sewer? From the ancient rot, sweetened 

 by the earth of ages, we poke out some bright relics, that's a fact, 

 showing how good men and women protested, or things might 

 have been worse, sooner even than mouldy old evidences show 

 thera to have been. 



Not much appears among the ^.ncients to flatter our wicked 

 vanity. Reformers were bought ofE and were driven off then as 

 now. But how can any one sell the right to pollute a stream — a 



■*See "Dwellings for the Poor in Jiflrge Cities," la Sanitary Engineer of Nov. 22, 1883. 



