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26
remember that, among your four bank-side subdistricts,
two suffered in marked excess; their
cholera-mortality having been 4½ times as great as
that of the other two. The fact is instructive;
because those two suffering sub-districts (though not
of lower mean level than the others) were marginal to
the valley of the Fleet, and were therefore exposed,
more than any other part of your province, to the
class of evils I have described. For a considerable
part of this locality may be regarded as but recently*
a creek of the Thames; its shelving banks, singularly
foul from ancient misuse, though now built over and
paved, undergo in their lower levels very considerable
soakage; while those vast sewers which lie in
the mid-channel of the former river, are more liable
than any within your jurisdiction, to suffer injurious
interference from the action of the tide. At every
such interference, and at every current of air setting
up the sewers, all gases generated in these large
chambers would diffuse themselves, not only in the
low level, but likewise widely east and west, up
those important slopes which depend on this valley
for their drainage. I can easily understand that
the radical cure of this district may be possible only
as a part of those metropolitan improvements to
which I have adverted; but I do think it of
* New Bridge Street was built over the Fleet in 1765. The
present site of Farringdon Street had been arched in thirty years
earlier, -for the purposes of the Fleet Market.