The Health of Nations

We may take in turn a few of the ways in which the lives of these 30,000 victims a year may be saved; and, with their lives, the infinite sorrow, suffering, and loss which these 30,000 deaths involve. There is a book with a most happy title, the instructive record of a most useful life — I mean The Health of Nations, by the well-known reformer Sir B. Richardson. In that book Dr. Richardson has collected the writings, described the schemes, and explained the work of his friend, Edwin Chadwick, the Nestor of sanitary reform, the Jeremy Bentham of the Victorian epoch, the pioneer and venerable chief of all health reformers.

Edwin Chadwick, himself the philosophical executor and residuary legatee of old Jeremy Bentham as a social and practical reformer, in extreme and hale old age — he was born in the last century, in 1800 — was still in 1887 hearty and energetic in the cause to which he has devoted sixty years of his life—the great cause of the Health of Nations. The Health of Nations is quite as important as the Wealth of Nations. If the Health of Nations does not need the philosophical genius of Adam Smith, or the analytic genius of Jeremy Bentham, it needs a spirit of social devotedness quite as serious, and a practical energy in the apostle quite as great. As Burke told us that John Howard had devoted himself to a ‘ circumnavigation of charity private guide turkey,’ so Edwin Chadwick sixty years ago began a ‘ circumnavigation of sanitation,’ and after all his voyages he has at length finally put into port.

Of all problems

Of all problems, the most important is—water. We are drinking water that at times is contaminated with sewage, as well as with foul surface drainage, and that to a degree which under possible conditions may become deadly. I saw not long ago one of the large affluents of the Upper Thames poisoned by mineral refuse to a degree which suddenly killed the whole of the fish. This garbage — mineral poison, refuse, and decaying fish — we in London had to drink. It is true that such are the forces of nature that even mineral poison and stinking fish does not kill us always — in moderate doses. Were it not for the vis medicatrix naturce in the matter of water, air, and soil, we should all be dead men some morning, the whole four millions of us together.

This want of abundant pure water is one of the most crying wants of our age. There are two or three modes in which London can be supplied with wholesome water. Whether it is to come out of the chalk, whether it is to be collected out of several of the southern rivers at their head sources, whether it is to come by a vast aqueduct from Bala Lake, the West Midland hills, or from Ullswater, we need not discuss. But it has to come — pure, abundant, constant. Ultimately, I believe, there will be a main aqueduct down England from the lakes of Westmoreland, sending off branch mains to the greater Northern and Midland towns, and pouring into London a river like the Eamont at Penrith —an inexhaustible source of pure water, just as the Claudian or the Julian Aqueducts poured their rivers into Rome — Rome, the immortal type of all that a great city ought to have in the way of water supply.

Let us away with all the nastiness and stupidities of cis-terns, with their dirt, poison, discomfort, and cost; away with the ball-cock, and the bursting pipes, and all the abominations of bungling plumbers. A continuous water supply is a necessity of civilisation. But free water is as much a necessity of civilisation as pure water, or continuous water.