1884.] CIVILIZATION AND ITS WASTES. 247 



the women and every man but one \^re flat on their backs half 

 the time this summer with some form of intermittent fever. 



Of course I wouldn't advertise that matter in this way if I sup- 

 posed other sections had any advantage. The best hope for con- 

 certed remedial action consists in frankly owning the notorious 

 facts. 



In old times — as long ago as jEsop, and later, too — free discus- 

 sion of this " social evil " was neither possible nor safe. His little 

 story of the wolf and the lamb — what do you suppose he meant by 

 it ? — might have stuck on the way down to us had it not been dis- 

 guised as a pretty fable. The bones of wolfish cities, however, — 

 smothered at last in their own corruption, — whiten along the pages^ 

 of history. Every lamb " eaten in a trice," for roiling the water up 

 stream, finds its modern counterpart in the still hunt for those who 

 oppose corporate impurity. JEsop, by the way, told some one 

 who asked, that the reason why hogs made such an outcry and 

 sheep took the butcher's knife so quietly, was because the latter 

 were constantly used to being sheared. But the " lambs " on our 

 polluted streams are of an age and sex — some of them — not to be 

 very tender eating. Our " wolves " are not the beasts of jEsop'5 

 time, either. They know which way their filthy water runs, and 

 some of them are becoming convinced that universal pollution 

 raises the ill winds which blow good to nobody. 



It may well be, however, that some in every audience can't see 

 this matter as I do. As physicians here and there appear to disa- 

 gree — more than they actually do, in my opinion — we may as 

 well go into details a little. It is reported of the flowage case, at 

 Lenox, Mass., where eight hundred people sickened around a new 

 mill pond, that seventeen doctors swore, in reference to health, 

 that filth did no harm and drainage no good. This is incredible. 



Let us imagine, if you please, Mr. Chairman, that one of us is a 



"lamb," down in the grass by a polluted stream somewhere, 



and that you are a person who has recently invested in the 



most approved fixtures for draining your house in town that have 

 ever been contrived. We meet as men continually meet — not 

 according to the old fable exactly — and are talking affably about 

 the matter. You go on and tell me how, when you first built and 

 married, you didn't know or think much about house -drainage, so 

 you fixed your back-door conveniences as your smartest neighbors 

 did. The well and privy consisted, really, of two adjacent holes, 



