270 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



more enlightened policy, it is sure ultimately to be acted 

 upon. The State cannot afford to go without it. If it is not 

 taken up on humanitarian grounds, it will be on pecuniary 

 grounds. That has been the experience of more than one 

 place. Sanitarians and philanthropists talked for a great 

 many years regarding the conditions of some of our south- 

 western and west-southern cities with respect to yellow fever. 

 So long as only men died and people suffered, while business 

 went on in the city of Memphis, these warnings were dis- 

 regarded. They had a cess-pool system there which seemed 

 incredible to us. The city lay on level ground along a l)luff, 

 and in order that they should not have so much trouble with 

 the filth (they were entirely without sewers) they dug their 

 cess-pools deeper and deeper. I have forgotten how many 

 thousands there were in the city, but I have not forgotten the 

 depth of them. They were thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet 

 deep, and they were not cleaned out from generation to gen- 

 eration. They went on digging more of them and digging 

 them deeper, and although that matter was not stopped on 

 humanitarian grounds, there came a time when it had to be 

 stopped on other grounds ; when the States around said, 

 " We cannot have a single city stand as a menace to the 

 commercial prosperity of the great Mississippi Valley." 

 When pestilence swept over them, it bankrupted the city. 

 The city, as a city, passed out of existence. There is no city 

 of Memphis to-day. They have disincorporated it, to get rid 

 of debts which they could not pay ; for a city may be bank- 

 rupt by sickness as a man may be ; and they sewered the city, 

 not they, but others did for them, to save the Mississippi 

 Yalley from pecuniary loss. 



Now, while I do not say that the state of things here is 

 such that we shall be placed in quite such a bad condition as 

 that, I say the day has passed when any town can afford to 

 be sickly. There is no city that can afford to have the repu- 

 tation of being a sickly place. Trade will not go there, 

 manufacturers will not build there, and if any town gets the 

 reputation of being permanently unhealthy, it is the heaviest 



