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56
inated water, even to the extent of excluding the flow from
cultivated land, yet it is quite sufficient for the people of
London to supply them with the effluent water of their neighboars'
water closets.
Other Towns Seek Purer Water
The oddity is that the very time the Royal Commission
was sitting some of its members were giving evidence on this
very point of polluted gathering ground, showing how the
matter had been lcoked at by other municipalities, and how in
certain cases reservoirs, collecting grounds, and plant had had
to be abandoned in consequence of increasing pollution of the
watershed. Speaking of the Trent, a member of the Royal
Commission says : " It is a river that flows through an enormous
tract of agricultural country, producing water which nowadays
one would not think of supplying." And yet poor London
would be thankful if the Thames did but drain only an
agricultural district; unfortunately the Royal Commission
received ample evidence of the pollution of the River not only
by towns but " by cesspools, privies, sewage farms, house-boats,
and manufacturing and manurial refuse," and also had before
them the evidence of Sir G. Buchanan, who assured them that
to judge of the purity of water they must go and see where it
comes from. The extraordinarary thing is that the Commission,
after seeing where it came from, and with what it was befouled,
still maintained that it was good to drink.
The report of the Parliamentary agent, Mr. H. L. Cripps,
begins by drawing attention to the fact that in the proceedings
before the Commission the witnesses were not cross-examined,
and that, although the evidence records a valuable series of
opinions upon different sides of many questions, its value is less
than would have been the case had it been tested by crossexamination,