Directing now attention to the practical side of the question, it has already been stated that the only known sewage treatment at the commencement of last century was land irrigation. Then about the middle of the century chemistry seems to have taken the matter in hand and tried to make a lucrative business out of it. It is on record, however, that it did not succeed in this attempt, and the financial loss which this endeavour has caused is a dismal subject to investigate. There is before my mind’s eye the case of a gallant officer of His Majesty’s land forces who, after having reached very near the summit of his career, retired and employed his time in trying to make a fortune out of sewage. So enamoured was he of the subject, that—so the story goes—he commuted his pension to have all the more ready money; but fortune did not smile on him, and his last days were spent under the lengthening shadows of the sorrow of financial difficulties, having practically lost all he possessed. The emphatic verdict of the first Sewage Commission of 1857, the first and second Rivers Pollution Commission, and, indeed, of all other authoritative investigations, was in favour of land treatment; and it cannot, therefore, be surprising to find that the Local Government Board insisted, save in exceptional cases, that “any scheme of sewage disposal, for which money is to be borrowed with their sanction, should provide for the application of the sewage or effluent to an adequate area of suitable land before it is discharged into a stream.” Indeed, had this body taken any different view and neglected the findings of practically all authoritative inquiries, it would have been singularly deficient in the discharge of its duties to the ratepayers of this country. But the best of land cannot go on for ever doing its duty if by systematic neglect and ignorance the essential conditions for successful purification are year after year violated; and the great pity is that the Local Government Board, after deciding in favour of land treatment, did not systematically superintend this operation. It may not have had the power, but it is quite evident that had it done so, things would not have drifted from bad to worse, until local authorities, driven to despair by the apparent failure of land and not discerning the right cause, refused altogether to be ruled by what seemed to them a very unfair and absurd restriction.