260 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



often educated by their fathers and by society to drain Mother 

 Earth as dry as they can. The " cocoon " of a rich farmer too 

 often consists of personal property — stocks, bonds, and mortgages, 

 easily distributed — easily wasted in blundering New Jerusalems, 

 and rarely finding its way back to the soil again. 



American land-butchers, the sweeping "agriculturists" of the 

 continent, cannot be expected to join heartily — can they? — in 

 pumping city sewage against gravitation upon our dry hills and 

 plains, because of a lifelong tranimg m pumping with gravitation. 

 The children or grandchildren of such — going by contraries, 

 according to an American fashion — might perhaps do it. 



The capital acquired in virgin land-butchery may help us, as 

 David gathered bloody stuff for the temple ; but we might as well 

 try making a good shepherd of an Indian hunter as a sewage gar- 

 dener from an "extensive" farmer. 



This "conflict" we are speaking of began in men's minds away 

 back in the pastoral age. Is that why boys, fresh from city gut- 

 ters, take their first lessons in agriculture so kindly from the rich 

 plains of the West, and why all is "Greek," to the most of us, 

 betwixt — town and country — the alpha and omega of American 

 civilization? 



Sanitary engineering — the new profession, as at present devel- 

 oped — deals chiefly with local traps, vents, flush-tanks and pipes 

 pointing into the creek, and causing — ike What's-his-name's 

 revolving gun — " tremendous slaughter on both sides." 



Do these engineers propose to arrange their pipes judiciously, in 

 regard to the course of "malarial waves," etc., etc., so that each 

 sewered community shall presently smother all riparian proprietors 

 below, and so make room for suburban sewage gardens? Or, if 

 that is not the game, what is the civil plan? Is there no calcula- 

 tion, no foresight at aU? Are we simply setting up miUs, villages, 

 and cities, like bricks, along our streams, to knock each other 

 down with plagues of disease and death, like rows of bricks in 

 childish play? 



Says Victor Hugo: "Paris throws five millions a year into the 

 sea. . . . With what object? Without any object. With what 

 thought? Without thinking of it. For what return? For noth- 

 ing. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What 

 is its intestine? Its sewer." 



The sanitary engineer who comes into my house and gallantly 



