412 
Half-a-dozen English Setoage Farms. 
Expenses and Returns or the Cheltenham Sewage Farm. 
Year. 
Labour. 
Materials and t ^ -i n >■ 
Bills. 1 Total Cost. 
Total Eeceipts.* 
Receipts from 
Sewage. 
1870 
1871 
1872 
1873 
1874 
1875 
IGS S 11 
154 10 5 
1G2 2 1 
147 3 0 
162 4 0 
153 0 3 
133 3 6 
105 0 0 
94 1 7 
116 16 7 
104 0 7 
243 G 7 
301 12 5 
259 10 5 
256 3 8 
263 19 7 
266 4 7 
396 G 10 
372 7 6 
975 2 0 
1010 15 10 
1068 9 3 
935 7 3 
1036 6 5 
956 8 0 
984 19 10 
952 16 8 
910 0 3 
1010 9 5 
Total 
U47 8 8 
796 8 10 
1713 17 6 
5398 8 3 
4814 14 2 
* The total receij ts include some small items for cottage rents upon the farm. 
18,000/., of which, deducting 10,500Z. spent in the purchase of 
land, 7500Z. was spent upon the sewer and other works connected 
with the conveyance and distribution of the sewage from the 
tanks. It will be seen that the returns from the land are not 
enough to bear the whole of the charges on these accounts as 
well as the agricultural rental ; but the result upon the whole, 
when compared with the experience of other towns, may well be 
gratefully accepted by the Cheltenham ratepayers. 
Cheltenham is not, indeed, by any means a satisfactory example 
of sewage utilisation, but it is a remarkable example of the 
abatement of the sewage nuisance at a minimum of expenditure. 
Here is a town dependent wholly on its water-closets for what 
may be called personal and domestic scavenging — whose sewage, 
therefore, must certainly be of at least the average strength — a town 
of more than 40,000 inhabitants, of which the drainage-matter 
may compare for quantity with towns of much larger population 
in the North, whose house-scavenging depends so much on the 
cesspool and the cart. It formerly drained into a small stream, 
which, of course, soon became utterly filthy and offensive ; but 
it has succeeded at hardly any cost in abating the nuisance it 
had created. In contrast to it I may refer to Blackburn, a town 
of 80,000 inhabitants, with, however, only 2000 water-closets 
from which, therefore (though the overflow of its cesspools 
passes into the sewers), one would think that there can hardly 
be a much filthier outflow than there is from Cheltenham. 
Blackburn has spent a ruinous amount in its attempt to achieve 
the same conclusion. It has spent 40,000/. in litigation. Parlia- 
mentary costs, and arbitrations alone ; and this is the key and 
clue to its unfortunate experience. In the case of Cheltenham, 
not a penny has been spent in litigation. The protests of those 
who were aggrieved were attended to at once ; the land was 
bought at a fair agricultural price ; the engineering was done by 
