50 



sive to buy ; and even if you can buy it, you cannot 

 in most cases, buy enough to satisfy the wants of 

 an increasing population. I have said it should be 

 dry land, and therefore generally lying at a higher level 

 than the town, that means expensive pumping to get 

 the sewage on to the land. The limited state of most 

 sewage-farms obliges the managers to put sewage upon 

 the land when it requires neither irrigation nor stimu- 

 lation. 



What is the result ? The most successful sewage-farm is 

 obliged to grow hardly any other crop than that gross 

 feeder, Italian rye-grass, and it generally resembles a 

 snipe-marsh more than it does a high-class farm. 



I will not even enter on the question whether or no the 

 same plot of land can stand for long a monotonous diet, 

 my private opinion being that what will kill the human 

 being is unsuitable to land. I mean the same food every 

 day. I believe I am correct in stating that it would require 

 the whole county of Kent to treat the sewage of London in 

 such a way that crops more remunerative than rye-grass 

 could be successfully produced. And what then would 

 Maidstone, Ramsgate, Margate, and Canterbury, and other 

 growing places do if London took up their available sewage- 

 farm ground ? if, indeed, it exists near them of a suitable 

 description. Besides all this, I assert that there is not an 

 existing sewage-farm of any fairly large town that is not at 

 times a dangerous nuisance, for the reason that to be other- 

 wise they should be at least four times as large. Let us 

 take London again as an instance of what is to be done to 

 produce a solution of this difficulty : can anyone assert 

 that a sewage farm is practicable for the Metropolis ? It 

 is utterly impossible. As another alternative, we are 

 threatened with an expenditure of two millions of money to 



