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6
The inadequacy of these Acts and the legal interpretation of
the same has in many instances brought about a state of affairs
resembling comedy more than it does any serious attempt to deal
with health affairs. Take just a few illustrations:—
Apart from specific cases, the general condition of the law
relating to liability for amending defective drainage is perhaps
the most extraordinary ever heard of. As interpreted in the
various leading cases, we are now in the position that owners of
property can successfully evade their liability to repair and
maintain the drainage of hundreds of premises although in every
instance these drains were originally laid as private drains by the
various owners, and purely for the purpose of draining private
premises. By various recent decisions which are final (until a
new Act is passed) any owner of two or more houses drained by
a combined drainage system, can under certain conditions throw
the cost of repairing and maintaining the greater part of these
drains upon the general body of ratepayers on the grounds that
from one cause or another they are legally held to be sewers,
repairable at the public cost, although in fact they originated as
private drains, and serve private dwellings or premises only.
In hundreds of cases the necessary conditions to make them
technically sewers were brought about quite illegally, in others
surreptitiously, and again in others could not probably have been
prevented had the authorities of that time had knowledge of what
was being done.
Notwithstanding all this, the ratepayers throughout the County
of London are in consequence of a highly immoral and defective
condition of the law, saddled with the cost of repairing private
drains as public sewers to the amount of twenty thousand pounds
(£20,000) per annum. So effectively does the law protect the
rights of property, that owners can take the fullest advantage of
the illegal acts of themselves or their predecessors in title, and
throw this charge on the public.