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51
So from this it Appears we have, like the twelve parts of the black figure,
the slow elimination as an essential part of it, in order to sum up the remaining
divisions into a whole and perfect theory.
Now in the same No. 37, which tells us of the barriers in the way of
getting rid of poisoned water, on the 15th of September, when the Cholera
was subsiding, and people began to breathe a little more freely, it was found
there was time to look about, and as it were, to take stock of the past. The
hydraulic engineer was called to account—Mr. Greaves. This is best given
in the words of authority. "The weekly report was published on Wednesday
morning, the 1st of August; on that day the engineer called, and on
the day following he published a letter in the daily journals showing that he
fully appreciated the importance of the crisis. The supply might have been
changed on Wednesday morning, but on that day no result appears; the
deaths were 170 ; on Thursday the deaths fell to 155, on Friday to 114, on
Saturday to 112, Ac." Then follow the comments, thus—" This coincidence
between the intervention of Mr. Greaves, and the decisive declension of
Cholera in the following week, deserves to be noted. It strengthens the
circumstantial inference that a part of the supply between the 8th of July
and the 1st of August was drawn from the uncovered reservoirs; but the
unclean matter might, of course, have entered the water through other unknown
channels."
I can well understand Mr. Greaves going away "a sadder," and after this
interview, "a wiser man," as well as "his appreciation of the importance of
the crisis," in his letter to the Times. But there is one thing about this
personage I cannot understand, namely, the transformation scene, his going
off rebuked and chastened, and stopping the Cholera so far as it declined from
170 deaths to 115 in two days. " The supply might have been changed on
Wednesday, the day of the visit, but no result appears," says the Report,
but on Friday, in 48 hours, the mortality had diminished one third of the
total from the engineering dexterity at the Water works.
I dwell not here for the total obliquity of the moral sense implied in this
imputation on the operators at the Company's works; I will not harbour so
fearful a suggestion, even if I could not see my way clearer, that a man, or a
body of educated men, could coolly look on and see a portion of their