Suspicious people have a knack of turning up in such dark places; and the police can’t be everywhere. Then there is the water supply. It is all very well to have a spirited foreign policy abroad, but we do want a little common sense at home; and the sanitary state of the nation is of the first importance. You cannot blame a man that he refuses to drink bad water, and takes beer instead; and if anything be clearer than another, it is that the water supplied to the working man is bad; for whilst the rich man can have his cisterns regularly cleaned out, and his water filtered, the working man, as a rule, uses the water as he can get it, and suffers in consequence, both in person and in pocket. Under the influence of this state of things, it is not surprising to find mothers refusing to allow their children to drink water on the plea that it is bad for their health. Nor are these mothers to be blamed. It is a fact that in England and Wales alone upwards of eight hundred persons die every month from typhoid fever; a disease which is now believed to be caused almost entirely through drinking impure water. It is a fact that in London we have little pure water to drink, the companies are put to a great expense to filter their water, and yet every week we read such reports as the following from Dr. Frankland, the official to whom is entrusted the analysing of such matters: “The Thames water, delivered by the West Middlesex, Southwark, and Grand Junction Companies, was so much polluted by organic matter as to be quite unfit for dietetic purposes.” The other day I had to pay my water rates; imagine my disgust at having to do so when the Government inspector in the daily papers informed me that the water supplied by the company was totally unfit for dietetic purposes! The evil is no new one. It has been ventilated in every way; and yet in London, the wealthiest city in the world, we cannot get a cup of pure water. People can have it in Manchester and Glasgow and New York; but in London—which claims to be the capital of commerce, the seat of Legislation, the model city—we have poison in the cup—as science tells us that we cannot take with impunity the living organisms and fungoid growths with which London water more or less abounds. Lately the working men met at Exeter Hall to say that it was time to put a stop to this disgraceful state of things. As Cardinal Manning said, if they wanted to give a subject the slip, the proper way was to get a committee of inquiry, and if they wanted to bury it altogether the right thing to do was to have a Royal Commission. Action is what is wanted. There are ten Parliamentary boroughs, and it was proposed to hold public meetings in each of them, to form a central committee, and thus to create a public pressure to which Parliament would have to give way. As it is, as Sir Charles Dilke pointed out, we have eight water companies in London who have increased the cost of water all