1884.] CIVILIZATION AND ITS WASTES. 249 



builders, experts, and medicine cost more than the house originally 

 did, and we are not satisfied yet. 



You confess ingenuously all these struggles of yours — these con- 

 flicts with your own waste — without ever thinking that your list- 

 ener is an agricultural "lamb" on the stream below, subject, not 

 only to the nuisance of your filth; but to that of 15,000 other people, 

 too. 



You honestly demand my sympathy in your troubles, losses, sick- 

 ness, and death. You are so innocent of all purpose to offend me 

 or mine tliat you are surprised when I ask what the odds is to the 

 stream my cattle make your milk and beef of, what hoppers you 

 dump your sick family filth through — or what patent trap for 

 sewer gas you put in last ? 



These particulars do not help epidemics of filth-disease in my 

 neighborhood any. My wife and children shake or toss in fever 

 all the same. Alterations in your methods of flinging your slops 

 into the brook have no use in sweetening the stream or the airs 

 blowing your way from it, either. 



This story is the story of thousands. Some have spent and suf- 

 fered less, some have suffered and spent more, and all is of no real 

 practical avail, except in helping trade and doleful experiments in 

 climbing up some other way. 



How can we expect to contrive a system of drainage and sewers 

 for a town while we have not yet learned to keep our own personal 

 pipes in order ? Verily, we must be born again and again, until 

 a generation that can see beyond its own nose has arisen, in wiser 

 selfishness, to take hold of this work. 



All we know at present is the ignorance of fowls who roost as 

 high as they can, forgetting how the baleful spirits of ordure will 

 rise higher than our wings can carry us. 



No animal but man is so incredibly foolish — when we come to 

 think it over — as to set the horrid example of extending his intes- 

 tinal canal into the brook. If we, tailless apes, do it, will not 

 imitative monkeys on the stream above us do it, too ? If we send 

 diphtheria, typhus, or the ague among our neighbors below 

 through our waste-pipes, must we not expect to draw " typhoid 

 malaria " or cholera from our neighbors above through our supply 

 pipes ? 



A few weeks ago Boston's Board of Health told how an epi- 

 demic of typhoid fever in Natick must endanger Boston. Why ? 



