90 The Disposal of Sewage bij Small Towns and Villages. 
artificial manure, and has been sold to ignorant and confiding 
farmers at 3L 10s. per ton. The sewers are flushed out once a 
month, the Sanitary Authority providing a water-cart, and pay- 
ing 6s. for man and horse when required. The whole of the 
sewers are under the management of Mr. W. Gilby, for many 
years the indefatigable Inspector of Nuisances of the Brixworth 
Union. 
Considerable opposition was originally raised to some of 
these drainage schemes, that to the Brixworth sewerage cost- 
ing the parish 1281. Some dissatisfaction is also caused by the 
manner in which the outlay for these great sanitary improve- 
ments is charged ; and Mr. Albert Pell, in the Annual Report of 
the Brixworth Union in 1879, somewhat justifies this complaint, 
for he says : " The law as it stands is regarded as inequitable, as 
it appears an improved value is conferred on one description of 
real property at the expense of another." This is quite true, 
but is a mere trifle when compared with the injustice of allow- 
ing realised wealth to escape its share of local burdens, which 
fall so oppressively upon the depreciated agricultural land of 
this country. 
The sanitary necessity for sewering some of the parishes in 
the Brixworth Union was stated in a report from Dr. Thorne 
Thorne, who, in 1874, wrote that "the deaths from fever per 
1,000 were, in the Standard Rural Districts, 48 ; in Northamp- 
tonshire, 80 ; and in this particular Union, 112." Dr. Thorne 
contended that " the mischief was traceable to cesspools and old 
highway-drains in porous soils allowing soakage and pollution 
of drinking-water, which is mostly derived from shallow springs." 
The water-tight system of sewers, which has been carried out in 
so many parishes, has, happily, been the means of almost banish- 
ing fever from those localities. Less sickness has been followed 
by a diminished poor's rate ; so the sewerage of the Union may 
be said to be, not only a sanitary, but a financial, success. 
The marked improvement in the health of this Union, Com- 
paring the ten years previous to any sewage scheme being 
adopted, with the ten years which followed its adoption, is thus 
described by Dr. Parsons in a later report to the Local Govern- 
ment Board. The information from the Registrar-General's 
annual and quarterly reports, " shows a gratifying decline of 
mortality amounting on their present population to an annual 
saving of about twenty lives, or, reckoning five severe cases of 
illness to one death, of one hundred severe illnesses with their 
attendant suffering and expense." With such testimony, how 
can any one doubt that the money laid out on these village 
sewers, has been well, wisely, and profitably spent ? 
