Yours very truly, (_Signed_) REDVERS BULLER. _To_ COL. A. S. JONES, V.C., C.E. It must not be gathered from the foregoing account that the War Office authorities are prejudiced in favour of the _natural_ treatment of sewage, for, like many other sanitary authorities, they have been bewildered of late years by the numerous forms of “_artificial_” treatment in vogue, and I know of more than one experimental installation for barracks where good available land has been neglected, for I read last summer of ghastly failures among the bacterial arrangements in some of those. [Sidenote: Success mainly due to activity of farm bailiff, foremen and other workers.] I cannot quit the above account of the vicissitudes of the Camp Farm in fourteen years’ growth from a sandy waste to a condition which tempted a tenant to pay a rent of 3_l._ odd per acre in 1880—its retrogression to its primitive waste during the following fifteen years—and restoration to its present measure of fertility, without expressing the belief that Mr. Blackburn’s success and my own have been mainly due to our good fortune in obtaining the willing services of excellent intelligent foremen and workers who, one and all, have taken a real interest in their several tasks. Mr. Cameron and other engineers may boast of their labour saving (?) automatic appliances for opening and shutting valves on sewage works, but practical workers, responsible for dealing with a million gallons a day and upwards average, in hourly varying flow of town sewage, will agree with me in hesitation as to placing entire confidence in the substitution of automatic machines for any large proportion of their manual labour. [Sidenote: Education and encouragement of sewage employees advocated.] I have for many years advocated education of sewage farm managers and watermen, to be selected from the rapidly decreasing class of agricultural labourers by the tender of high wages, houses and good gardens, with other profit-sharing allowances which it will well pay sanitary authorities to hold out to their sewage employees. In this sense I am glad to note the recent formation of “_The Association of Managers of Sewage Disposal Works_,” Secretary, Charles H. Ball, 5 Fetter Lane, London, E.C., as a Trades Union move from within well calculated to raise the status of the class of men upon whose exertions the community must mainly rely if there is to be any hope of improving the condition of our streams and rivers. [Sidenote: Evidence and Reports of Lord Iddesleigh’s Royal Commission.] Two large Blue Books containing the evidence taken by Lord Iddesleigh’s Royal Commission have been published since the Interim Report, and their contents more than warrant the opinion expressed in the latter; indeed it must surely be admitted that the case for each of the artificial systems was very fully gone into before that Commission expressed the guarded conclusion, “We doubt if any land is entirely useless.”