Sewers have been carrying away the detritus of civilizations for a long while. Victor Hugo called the sewer "the conscience of the city," in his 1862 novel Les Miserables. He called it "a cynic," because, "It tells everything."

Sewers remain the conscience of the city. Nothing has changed, except added to the basket handles and human manure are the dregs of twenty-first century industrial processes. It is a conscience in great need of moral counsel.

Les Miserables. Volume V. Book Second. The Intestine of the Leviathan. Chapter I. The Land Impoverished by the Sea.

Paris throws five millions a year into the sea. And this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? Without any object. With what thought? Without thinking of it Why? For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? Its sewer.

Five millions is the most moderate of the approximate figures which the estimates of special science give.

Science, after long experiment, now knows that the most fertilising and the most effective of manures is that of man. The Chinese, we must say to our shame, knew it before us. No Chinese peasant, Eckberg tells us, goes to the city without carrying back, at the two ends of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we call filth. Thanks to human fertilisation, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred and twenty fold. There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most powerful of stercoraries. To employ the city to enrich the plain would be a sure success. If our gold is filth, on the other hand, our filth is gold.

What is done with this filth, gold? It is swept into the abyss.

Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element of wealth which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and animal manure which the world loses, restored to the land instead of being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

These heaps of filth at the gate-posts, these tumbrils of mire which jolt through the street by night, these horrid scavengers' carts, these fetid streams of subterranean slime which the pavement hides from you, do you know what all this is? It is the flowering meadow, it is the green grass, it is marjoram and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied low of huge oxen in the evening, it is perfumed hay, it is golden wheat, it is the bread on your table, it is the warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is life. Thus wills that mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Put that into the great crucible; your abundance shall spring from it. The nutrition of the plains makes the nourishment of men.

You have it in your power to throw away this wealth, and to think me ridiculous in the bargain. That will cap the climax of your ignorance.

Statistics show that France alone makes a liquidation of a hundred millions every year into the Atlantic from the mouths of her rivers. Mark this: with that hundred millions we could pay a quarter of the expenses of the government. The cleverness of man is such that he prefers to throw this hundred millions into the gutter. It is the very substance of the people which is carried off, here drop by drop, there in floods, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Each hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this two results: the land impoverished and the water infected. Hunger rising from the furrow and disease rising from the river.

It is notorious, for example, that at this hour, the Thames is poisoning London.

As for Paris, it has become indispensable of late, to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluiceways, sucking up and flowing back, a system of elementary drainage, as simple as the lungs of man, and which is already in full operation in several villages in England, would suffice to bring into our cities the pure water of the fields and send back to our fields the rich water of the cities; and this easy seesaw, the simplest in the world, would retain in our possession the hundred millions thrown away. We are thinking of something else.

The present system does harm in endeavouring to do good. The intention is good, the result is sad. Men think they are purging the city, they are emaciating the population. A sewer is a mistake.

Laura Orlando
Editor

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