VII. The Water Party. Water rains from heaven, and leaps out of the earth; it rolls about the land in rivers, it accumulates in lakes; three-fourths of the whole surface of the globe is water; yet there are men unable to be clean. “God loveth the clean,” said Mahomet. He was a sanitary reformer; he was a notorious impostor; and it is our duty to resist any insidious attempt to introduce his doctrines. There are in London districts of filth which speak to us—through the nose—in an emphatic manner. Their foul air is an atmosphere of charity; for we pass through it pitying the poor. Burke said of a certain miser to whom an estate was left, “that now, it was to be hoped, he would set up a pocket-handkerchief.” We hope, of the miserable, that when they come into their property they may be able to afford themselves a little lavender and musk. We might be willing to subscribe for the correction now and then, with aromatic cachou, of the town’s bad breath; but water is a vulgar sort of thing, and of vulgarity the less we have the better. In truth, we have not much of it. We are told that in a great city Water is maid of all work; has to assist our manufactures, to supply daily our saucepans and our tea-kettles; has to cleanse our clothes, our persons, and our houses; to provide baths, to wash our streets, and to flood away the daily refuse of the people, with their slaughter-houses, markets, hospitals, &c. Our dozen reservoirs in London yield a supply daily averaging thirty gallons to each head—which goes partly to make swamps, partly to waste, partly to rot, as it is used in tubs or cisterns. Rome in her pride used once to supply water at the rate of more than three hundred gallons daily to each citizen. That was excess. In London half a million of people get no water at all into their houses; but as those people live in the back settlements, and keep out of our sight, their dirt is no great matter of concern. We, for our own parts, have enough to cook with, have whereof to drink, wherewith to wash our feet sometimes, to wet our fingers and the corner of a towel—we inquire no further. Drainage and all such topics involve details positively nasty, and we blush for any of our fellow-citizens who take delight in chattering about them.