Aldershott—a town in miniature without a river, and in a comparatively primæval condition. It could there be ascertained whether it is not practicable, by the dry chemistry of fire, and at very moderate cost, utterly to destroy the nuisance, while leaving a marketable residuum of little bulk and easy transport—this as regards the solids. As regards the liquids: undiluted, there would be little difficulty in dealing chemically with them, extracting the valuable salts, and suffering the innoxious filtered liquid to flow away. This would be a valuable boon from a government to a nation, putting “matter in the right place,” and showing that what holds good of a camp or a temporary town holds good also of a city or permanent town.
There are four methods to try:—First, to destroy the nuisance by fire. Secondly, to neutralise it by chemical action. Thirdly, to inclose in oil or analogous material, so as to exclude the atmosphere. Lastly, to keep the solids and liquids apart in all cases, and to cease from multiplying the evil by enormous dilution, the results of which we experience in the condition of the Thames.
As regards immediate action, we must pay the penalty of our ignorance in converting the Thames into a cesspool. In the blue books of the Board of Health the sewers were denominated “elongated cesspools.” Under diluvian guidance the Thames has become an open black ditch for the reception of their contents, blocked up by the incessantly returning tide—the protest of the ocean against pollution.
Nature helps us. With the thermometer at 80°, the acetous fermentation of the river commences, and goes on to the putrefactive, converting into unsavoury but warning gases the excreta lying in the channel of the river, and so the nuisance is gradually carried away by the atmosphere. If the warm weather lasted long enough each summer, and the supply of matter were cut off, the Thames would become pure, as it does in casks or tanks on shipboard,—horrible to every sense while the fermenting process is going on, but pronounced by all skippers frequenting the Thames harbour as the finest water in the universe when the gases are thrown off and the no longer fermentable mud subsides to the bottom—a thing almost incredible to those who have not witnessed it.
And yet some millions are to be given to engineers to expend in huge high tunnels to form a temporary safety-valve for London, while chemists and engineers are studying the processes which will ultimately render the tunnels useless, after a plentiful crop of litigation on the part of the inhabitants of the outfall regions—the present Croydon process on a gigantic scale. Well; we are a rich nation, and prefer the impracticable methods which we call practical to logical inference leading to probable experimental verification. We prefer arriving at the processes that will do by going in succession through all the processes that will not do.
It is not creditable to our common sense that it should be needful to discuss such a question in public journals. It was a maxim of the elder Bonaparte that “dirty linen should be washed at home.” That is, the dirt kept out of public view: but the nuisance has endured so long that, perforce, it must be talked of in public in order to get the public to understand it, and to enforce the needful change.
THE HEAD OF BRAN.
For an account of this British worthy, see “The Mabinogion,” Lady Charlotte Quest’s translation. He was the son of Llyr, king of Britain, and said to be the first convert to Christianity in these islands. Hence his title, “Bendigeid, the Blessed.” Taliesin, the bard, the “radiant brow,” was one of the seven princes to whom it was committed to carry the head to its resting-place.
The Head was buried, looking towards France, in the Gwnvryn, or White Mount, site of the Tower of London. And this was called “the third goodly concealment of the isles of Britain;” for that no invasion from across sea came to this island while the Head was in that concealment. Arthur, “the blameless king,” had it disinterred, refusing, in his pride, to trust to the charm. And this the Triads term the third ill-fated disclosure of the isles of Britain, invasion and general disaster following it.
I.
When the Head of Bran
Was firm on British shoulders,
God made a man!
Cried all beholders.
Steel could not resist
The weight his arm would rattle;
He, with naked fist,
Has brain’d a knight in battle.
He march’d on the foe,
And never counted numbers;
Foreign widows know
The hosts he sent to slumbers.
As a street you scan,
That’s tower’d by the steeple,
So the Head of Bran
Rose o’er his people.
II.
“Death’s my neighbour,”
Quoth Bran the Blest;
“Christian labour
Brings Christian rest.
From the trunk sever
The Head of Bran,
That which never
Has bent to man!
“That which never
To men has bow’d,
Shall live ever
To shame the shroud:
Shall live ever
To face the foe;
Sever it, sever,
And with one blow.
“Be it written,
That all I wrought
Was for Britain,
In deed and thought:
Be it written,
That, while I die,
Glory to Britain!
Is my last cry.
