1864.] CHEMISTRY OP MANURES. Ill 



value of sewage to fertilize land, still denied the soundness and 

 economy of the mechanical arrangements proposed by ihe Sanitary 

 Reformers for its distribution. On an engineering question, 

 public opinion (not unnaturally) sided at the outset with the 

 engineers. The new system has had, therefore, to encounter a 

 professional opposition, all the more formidable for being thoroughly 

 conscientious. Probably that opposition, with the controversy it 

 has engendered, and, above all, the experiments to which it has 

 given rise, constitutes a wholesome ordeal to test the soundness 

 of the new plan, and to bring about the correction of such weak 

 points as it may present. But in the mean time, the application 

 of town sewage to farm-lands, on an extensive, national scale, has 

 stood, and still stands, adjourned. 



Hence the present condition, obviously transitional, of the great 

 manufacturing and commercial towns of England; hence the in- 

 sufferable pollution of her streams and rivers; hence that prodig- 

 ious squandering of the elements of human blood, for which she is 

 so bitterly reproached by Liebig. 



But the same mighty power of steam which brought about the cen- 

 tralization of the manufacturing population in great towns, with 

 the evils thence ensuing, and the sanitary am.^liorations by which 

 those evils were (in part) subdued, came fraught with other prin- 

 ciples also, and other events, not less influential in the development 

 of the manurial industry. Among these the most conspicuously 

 important, in their baaring upon this great industry, were the 

 doctrine and practice of Free Trade. The historical affiliation of 

 Free Tradj to steam-power is direct and obvious. The millions 

 congregated by steam-power had to be fed. To the working of 

 the new factory-system cheap corn was as necessary as cheap 

 coal. The restriction of bread-supplies, and, the consequent en- 

 hancement of their price, by artificial means, to benefit a class,, 

 became utterly inadmissable. Protection, always a fallacy, was 

 now also an anachronism ; and after a severe struggle, and a 

 long series of transitional expedients, the ports of England were 

 thrown open freely to foreign supplies of food. The cultivators 

 of this cold northern soil were thus exposed to the competition of 

 rival food-growers, tilling, beneath warmer suns, the more prolific 

 corn-fields of the south. Upon this unequal competition the Eng- 

 lish territorial proprietors entered, as upon a struggle for life or 

 death. Abundant manuring seciued at the outset their main, if 



