i88o.] 
The London Water-Supply . 
77 
bv the possibility, of competition. But we cannot trust it 
a hair’s breadth further. Give an individual, or, what is 
still worse, a company, a perpetual and indefeasible mono- 
poly, and k career of extortion and of the mos high-handed 
official insolence is at once inaugurated. Of all such mon 
polies that of a water-company is the worst, because, save 
bv removal from the distria, there is no escape from its 
DO wer. If a gas-company overcharges us or supplies a 
wretched article we can take refuge in lamps, or in the 
elearic light, or even make our own gas, as is done in many 
large establishments in the North of England. But for 
water we can find no substitute. Mr. Shirley Hibberd* 
proposes, indeed, that the water should be collected on the 
house-tops, filtered, and kept not in cisterns exposed to a r 
and light, but in underground tanKs, lined of course with 
impervious materials. From a sanitary point of view the 
niJn is feasible, and were it carried out would materially 
Sn the grasp of those eight old men of the water who 
are riding about in triumph upon the shoulders of London. 
But it has one fatal fault ; neither landlords nor tenants will 
consent to the heavy first outlay. Hence we fear that no 
appreciable relief to the public can be obtained by this 
Sod. As for the metropolitan wells they have ong since 
been condemned as suspicious. Seeing, therefore, that 
London is and must be solely dependent upon water-supplies 
drawn from without its ever-widening limits, we shall the 
better appreciate the wisdom of the legislature in granting 
to the water-companies a perpetual monopoly. Why such 
and similar companies should be thus exceptionally favoured 
we know not. The rights of a patentee lapse at the end of 
his term of fourteen years. A lessee, at the expiration of 
his lease, sees the land he has held and the buildings he has 
ereCted become the property of the lessor. Water-com- 
panies if sanctioned at all, should have been dealt with in 
a similar manner. In France they receive a concession for 
ine hundred years, after which their privileges, and even 
their reservoirs, mains, and other property, revert to the 
P wtT““mpa.i« will do aod wha.rarlian.oot will 
sanction may be learnt from the case of Sheffield. When 
the bursting of the great Bradfield reservoir had drowned 
more than one hundred people, and destroyed or damaged 
property exceeding in value the total assets of the loca 
. Water for Nothing : Every House its Own Water-Supply. By Shirley 
Hibberd, F.R.H.S. London : Effingham Wilson. 
