Value of Human Life in Canada. 183 



are generally paid, was now necessarily empty, being flooded, I 

 will not say with water, but with liquid manure, the disgusting 

 emanations from which ascend through the stair case and between 

 the boards, into the upper story. It was by wading on bricks 

 through this mass of pollution that the tenant bad to obtain her 

 supply of water; this being the one only health-spot in the whole* 

 where the pipe, rising through the foetid drainage of the court? 

 discharges the pure water of the Ottawa for the pallid occupants. 

 The upper tenants had been there for 15 months, and assured me 

 that the yard had never been cleaned during the whole time. 

 And yet the authorities, who confiscate unwholesome meat when 

 offered in the shambles, allow the use of these unwholesome dens 

 to be freely sold to those whose ignorance or poverty keeps them 

 from remonstrance; and men are found willing to draw $21.50 a 

 month, as payment for the privilege of inhaling poison, in places 

 where no right-thinking man would keep his horse, scarcely his 

 pig; and where he would not live himself (or rather die) for any 

 amount of money. 



During the long months of winter, all injurious emanations are 

 happily frozen up, like the fabled tunes blown into Munchausen's 

 horn. But when the spring thaw comes, the whole mass of cor- 

 ruption, which has been accumulating on the surface and among 

 the snow, is set free ; not only sinking into the unpaved back 

 yards, and there laying by a deep store of pollution to rise up at 

 the bidding of the summer sun, in the form of fever or cholera ; 

 but running into and around the dwellings, soaking into the floors, 

 and sponged up by the timber walls, where the reeking colour, 

 premonitory of disease, is hidden behind some tawdry paper ; and 

 the heedless victim of ignorance, generally also of intemperance, 

 hires the poisoned coffin in which his wife and little ones are con- 

 strained to dwell. 



In the more healthy parts of the city, the winter manure is dis- 

 lodged by the melting snow and precipitated on the solid matter. 

 As the streets rapidly dry, fine dust is formed in immense masses; 

 and while the poor below are wading on bricks through the liquid 

 stench -bowls,* the gentry are inhaling similar pollutions in the 

 form of impalpable and perceptible dust. It is evident that both 



• The myriads of flies of which the inhabitants complain, are the ne- 

 cessary result of the putrid refuse. In the present state of the city, they 

 act as nature's scavangers, and should be reckoned among the greatest 

 blessings. 



