TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE WATER QUESTION.
Finn and pestilence are Heaven's ministers for improving the health of towns, and evermore with inexorable sternness do they work out their beneficent mission. The chastisement they inflict on us is always just, for it flows directly from the offence and is meted out by its measure. No sophistry can palter with the judgment of those righteous monitors ; no juggling arts, no trader's tricks, no banded force of monied conspirators, can evade their scrutiny or baffle their avenging strokes. We have them always amongst us, though it is only on rare and solemn occasions we lay their impressive warnings to heart. When they thin our numbers by scores or by hundreds, we never pause to think why they so deal with us ; only when they visit us with sweeping de- struction do we tardily enter upon a course of amendment, and pursue it with a fitful zeal that waxes and wanes with our panic fears. It is ever thus with that fluctuating and desultory power the National Will ; a power with which wise statesmen can achieve the greatest things, and peddling placemen—nothing ; a power that, rightly seized and guided, may be made to burst through all impediments, but which is incapable of permanent tension in any one direction. A nation is not always wise, always united in its wishes and its strength; but shame and wo to that Government which lets pass the flood-tide of national opinion that would carry it onward to the attainment of national blessings.
To the physical and moral effects of vast calamities, such as the Plague and the Great Fire of the seventeenth century, London is largely indebted for its present degree of salubrity : much greater indeed were that salubrity, and in every way more elegant and convenient would the Metropolis have become, if the wise sug- gestions of Sir Christopher Wren had been adopted by the men in authority in those days. We are not yet insured against the con- tingency of marring ignorance in high places ; nevertheless, it is scarcely conceivable that the London of the nineteenth cen- tury should fail to profit by a second visitation of the Cholera. We must sweep away for ever the nidus and the pabulum for disease which our sloth or perversity has provided on every square inch of the Metropolis. The will exists in sufficient force, and waits but the ruling mind and hand that shall convert it into deed. If that mind and that hand are to be found among the members of the existing Government, why then the victory is already won ; but found they must be, if not in the Cabinet then elsewhere. At all events, let us bear well in mind for our mutual encouragement, that we possess the main element of suc- cess—a common, definite, and strenuous purpose. It has been for want of this alone that we have so long foregone many sana- tory improvements of the most obvious and generally recognized necessity. Our will, not our knowledge, has been at fault. The Water question, for instance, which now so prominently occupies public attention, has been frequently agitated, and its merits have been searchingly developed from time to time during the last quarter of a century. Twenty-one years ago, a Royal and a Parliamentary Commission severally denounced the filth, un- wholesomeness, and progressive deterioration of the Thames water, and emphatically condemned the system which, with re- gard to an article "of vital and paramount importance," left the inhabitants of this vast metropolis dependent on " the unlimited discretion of companies possessing an exclusive monopoly of that commodity."
The practical consideration of the Water question involves three main topics : 1. Quality ; 2. Quantity and sources of sup- ply; 3. Administration. For the present we shall advert chiefly to the first of these ; reserving the others for future inquiry. What London requires, (as well as every other town in the United Kingdom,) is an uninterrupted, abundant, ubiquitous sup- ply of good water, at a minimum cost. The chief sources of sup- ply at present are the Thames and the New River, and peradven- ture they may always continue to be so. The water they contain is not good : if it were, and if it could be properly distributed, there would be an end to all our difficulties in the matter; for such a volume of water, circulating through every street and alley of London, and through every house from roof to basement, would be more than sufficient for all public and private purposes. Assuming that it could be so distributed, let us ascertain how far the quality of this water is susceptible of improvement.
The first thing to be insisted on is that the fluid delivered to us from the Thames shall be water simply, not water and sewage manure. To this end, the supply must be taken from a part of the river wholly beyond the tidal influence, and the sewage from the towns and villages along the banks must no longer be suffered to pollute the stream. It would be no hardship for those towns and villages to be compelled to reserve their sewage-water for agri- cultural purposes. The plan has already been officially recom- mended to some of them by the Inspecting Engineers of the Board of Health as one likely to be self-remunerating. We shall then have in the bed of the river what may be called crude water of average quality, or the raw material, to be afterwards refined to the requisite degree of purity. This raw material will still con- tain much foreign matter : .1. mechanical impurities, separable by subsidence, and filtration ; 2. vegetable and animal matter, living and dead; 3. earthy salts held in solution, and imparting to the water the quality of hardness.
Professor Clark of Aberdeen has invented a system of tests by
which the chemical examination of water for hardness and alkali- nity, formerly a most tedious and uncertain operation, may be performed in less than an hour, with a delicate precision that dis- covers and weighs the solid matter present down to 1-500,000th part of the weight of the water tested. A means of succinctly expressing and comparing the results thus obtained is afforded by the Professor's scale, each degree of which corresponds to as much hardness as would be produced by dissolving (by means of car- borne or other acid) one grain of chalk in one gallon of soft water. These ingenious applications of science have been adopted by the Board of Health and the Commissioners of Woods and Forests ; the latter of whom require of the promoters of every bill for sup- plying a town with water, that they shall furnish a full statement of the quality of the proposed. water, including " its degree of hardness with reference to the tests and scale of Dr. Clark." The London waters average 14 degrees of hardness ; in other words, they hold in solution earthy matter equivalent to 14 grains of chalk per gallon, and not separable from them by any me- chanical contrivance. How to throw down three-fourths of that matter in an insoluble form, and consequently to reduce the hard- neas of the water in the same proportion, is a problem solved by the same able chemist, to whom we are indebted for the above- named tests and scale. Professor Clark has taken out a patent for softening water by mixing with it a definite proportion of or- dinary lime-water ; and he has himself supplied the following po- pular explanation of the theory of his process- " What occurs in this operation will be understood if we suppose that one pound of chalk, after being, burned to nine ounces of quick-lime, is dissolved so as to form forty gallons of lime-water; that another pound is dissolved by seven ounces of extra carbonic acid, so as to form 560 gallons of a solution of bicarbonate of lime;" —[a solution not sensibly different from the cleanest Thames water]—" and that the two solutions are mixed, making up together 600 gallons. The nine ounces of nick-lime from the pound of burnt chalk unites with the seven extra ounces of carbonic acid that hold the dissolved pound of chalk in solution. These nine ounces of caustic lime and seven ounces of carbonic acid form sixteen ounces, that is one pound of chalk; which, being insoluble in water, becomes visible imme- diately on its being formed, at the same time that the other pound of chalk, being deprived of the extra seven ounces of carbonic acid that kept it in solution, re- appears. Both pounds of chalk will be found at the bottom after subsidence. The GOO gallons of water will remain above, clear and colourless, without holding in solution any sensible quantity either of quick-lime or of bicarbonate of lime.""
But this is not all. The lime-water kills the germs of vegeta- tion and the aquatic insects and animalcule'; and the fine par- ticles of the chalk, as it forms, envelop their remains and carry them down to the bottom, leaving the water clearer and more free from colour than it could be rendered by mere filtration. The cost of the process would be almost nominal. For ten pounds a day, enough quick-lime might be supplied to purify the whole water consumption of the Metropolis, estimated at forty millions of gallons daily, and to remove from it about twenty-four tons of chalk a day, or nine thousand tons a year ; and the chalk thus separated would be available to be used as manure or to be burnt and converted into quick-lime. Against this small daily outlay of ten pounds or less, let us see what pecuniary advantages we may set off as likely to accrue to the public.
Everybody knows that it needs more soap and more rubbing to make a lather with hard than with soft water ; in fact, it is not possible to wash in the former until a certain amount of materials (soap or soda) has first been expended and destroyed in neu- tralizing the hardness. Clark's process would reduce the waste of soap thus incurred by two-thirds, and would probably effect a saving of the whole quantity of crystallized soda consumed in pri- vate families and in laundries. The inhabitants of London now pay the Water Companies an aggregate rent equivalent to a-poll- tax of 3s. 4d. The consumption of soap and soda, swollen as it is by the hardness of the water, costs twice as much per head, or about 630,0001. annually for the whole population ; and it is esti- mating at a very moderate rate the probable economy in soap and soda to be effected by the softening process, if we set it down at 10 per cent on the latter large item.
"It is not, however, alone in soap and soda that a saving arises from the use of soft water in washing. The labour of washing clothes is much increased by the use of hard water, and the wear and tear in consequence is probably a more ex- pensive item than the additional soap." And then, " there is the consideration of comfort—up to this the almost unpurchaseable comfort of soft water in London. . . . . The use of peculiar and expensive soap never can compensate for hardness in watee.
Another advantage derivable from Clark's process is, that it prevents the incrustation of boilers, hitherto an occasion of great inconvenience and expense as well as danger in all works where steam power is employed.
It is,not in consequence of difficulties inherent in the nature of Professor Clark's process that its benefits have hitherto been with- held from the public. If the process involve any practical dif- ficulties, they are such as yet remain to be disclosed by untried experiments ; nothing in the present state of our knowledge war- rants us in anticipating their existence. The process has re- mained in abeyance because the Companies have had no motive for adopting an improvement which would not increase their dividends, though it might enable them to supply a better article to their customers. It is time that the merits of an in- vention which promises so largely to benefit the public in health, wealth, and comfort, should be tried by a tribunal in whose ca- pacity and integrity the public can repose full confidence. It is * " A New Process for Purifying the Waters supplied to the Metropolis by the existing Water Companies: rendering each Water much softer, preventing fur on boiling, separating vegetating and colouring matter, destroying numerous water-insects, and withdrawing from solution large quantities of solid matter not separable by mere filtration. By Thomas Clark, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Aberdeen." A sixpenny pamphlet of fifteen octavo pages.
time, indeed, that the whole subject of the supply of water to the Metropolis, with all its appendages, should undergo thorough in- vestigation by authority, with a view to the prompt adoption and completion of such measures as shall seem likely to yield the greatest possible benefit to the inhabitants of London.
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