How to secure them. 115 



have produced a variety of cheap and effective closet that 

 leave builders of small house property without excuse, and yet 

 there are hundreds of small houses in Belfast that have no other 

 convenience besides a common open privy, producing the most 

 offensive sight and smell. The only excuse offered for this 

 serious defect is, that owners of small house property find that 

 their tenants misuse or woefully destroy any breakable apparatus 

 provided. For this neglect or damage there surely should be a 

 remedy. 



Attached to the privy, there is the no less dangerous open 

 cesspool or dust -heap, exposed alike to sunshine and to rain, as 

 if intentionally to facilitate the decomposition of the filthy 

 compound, and to generate the microbes that find rest and 

 culture on the top and surface of the badly-built yard walls, 

 saturated with wet and disintegrated by frost. The danger 

 from this source begins when the refuse is allowed to remain 

 beyond a week ; and yet it is often allowed to remain not only 

 for weeks, but for months. T have seen rows of such houses, 

 back to back, with a common passage between them ; and this 

 passage, instead of being a clear place by which the refuse from 

 the yard is regularly removed, is itself the common receiving- 

 place for all kinds of impurity, from the over-filled manure pits 

 of the several neighbouring houses. Here I have frequently 

 looked upon broken crockery and old clothes, dead cats and 

 cabbage stumps, bones and bottles, chimney sweepings and 

 discarded headgear, old shoes, boots, and brickbats, and, over 

 all, careering before the wind, the loose chaff just discharged 

 from a used-up bedtick, on which, perhaps, some poor invalid 

 had recently died of an infectious disease. Let any ordinary 

 observer examine for himself the several items described, and 

 he will have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that the 

 present state of large numbers of our workers' dwellings must 

 be injurious to health, and that, as a rule, no proper provision 

 is made for the personal comfort of the inmates, and that, 

 therefore, no encouragement is given to those who desire to be 

 neat and cleanly in their habits. It is essential that every 



