252 ' BOABD OP AGRICULTUEE. [Jan., 



better with the fecal filth of cities than was done by the best of 

 the ancients. We are learning to hide it in deep drains, where the 

 temperature is cooler, and ferment less hurried, and we have 

 learned to our cost, as tbe ancients did, that this material needs 

 air. Frequent sewer openings accompany the streets and sidewalks 

 of every intelligent city, while the organic waste of humanity 

 moves sluggishly below. City waste goes — not to a haven of reor- 

 ganization in some paradisic city garden, to return, like rain, in an 

 eternal round of refreshment. No — but it goes from inland vil- 

 lages and cities to sicken their own people along the meadows and 

 pastures below, and multiply the chances of returning miasm and 

 ■death at our own doors. 



When the city meets the country now-a-days in loving embrace, 

 things are so dreadfully mixed that we can't tell who is giving the 

 other a distemper. 



In treating this " conflict " for an hour am T too hopeless ? Can 

 we restore our streams to purity and catch shoals of red-fins on 

 every ripple, and trout in every bend of the brook, as' we used to 

 when we were boys, or must we give up our waters to snapping- 

 turtles and other case-hardened amphibia, while races of men 

 fitted — or "acclimated" as some doctors say — by long heredity, 

 and accustomed more and more to filthy conditions, shall gradu- 

 ally be elected to fill our places ? In that degrading theory of 

 lasting life our short cut would be to beg the beggars from the 

 slums of European cities, or cross our New England people with 

 river Chinese at once. 



But I don't see why we should build houses, villages, and cities 

 so cramped and helpless in this broad land as to be forced out of 

 existence by our own ordure; nor wLy we should follow headlong 

 the beaten track of national corruption and decay. Sometimes I 

 think our great theological roosters crow too long upon one metro- 

 politan dung-hill. 



In the vast spaces between our cities there is room yet for 

 righteous republican states. The interest in saving and the love 

 of economy is as strong in the town as in the country. In this 

 matter of social waste and the dechne of public health — resulting 

 in national waste and ruin — I believe the larger cities are quite as 

 ready to reform as our rural people are. My first reading of soil 

 and stream pollution came from certain hunlble Philadelphia prints 



