BRITISH AGRICULTURE. 475 



tion of meats, groceries, fruits, and vegetables. As milk i re- 

 quired, large dairies are kept in and about the city; and the 

 number of horses that are kept either for business or pleasure 

 is very great. All this, you perceive, implies a large consump- 

 tion of farm produce. But, with the exception of solid ma- 

 nures from the dairies and liveries and of a part of the street 

 sweepings, the whole sewage of this immense city flows into 

 the Thames. It has been said that an equivalent for the ele- 

 ments of a hundred million bushels wheat are here ingulfed 

 annually ; and such is the dark, dense turbidness of the Thames* 

 that you would be ready to believe the estimate. But suppose 

 that no more than half as much guano flows into the Thames, 

 and that one-half of this finds its way back by the operation 

 of those higher laws before alluded to ; even then an equiva- 

 lent for twenty-five million bushels of wheat — something which 

 would increase the wheat crop of Great Britain to that extent 

 if incorporated with the soil — is lost to the agriculture of the 

 United Kingdom. If to this be added the wastes of a hundred 

 smaller cities and towns, the amount is enormous. 



It is different with the cities ©f the European continent. 

 France is wiser in this respect. The cleanliness of the Seine 

 is in striking contrast with the filthiness of the Thames. 

 France suffers but little of the fertilizing elements of her cities 

 to be washed away in her rivers, and Belgium literally nothing. 

 Her rivers, though small, are hardly strained in passing through 

 a city of a hundred thousand people. Nothing is tolerated in 

 the streets of Belgian cities which could by possibility fertilize 

 a foot of ground in the country. But England expends millions 

 for Peruvian guano, and sutlers scores of millions' worth of 

 like materials to pollute her rivers. "We, being yet in our in- 

 fancy, and having a virgin West to fall back upon, are more ex- 

 cusable ; but the time will come, if it has not come already, 

 when it will be far wiser for us to withhold the sewage of our 

 eastern cities from the Atlantic Ocean than to send our ships 

 round Cape Horn for guano ; and when this is done, there can- 

 not be the least doubt that the agriculture of these Atlantic 

 States will be prosperous. Our farmers are now paying twelve 

 millions a year for guano. If one-half as much could be ex- 

 pended in wisely-conducted measures for saving and rendering 



