To you, Gentlemen, as Commissioners of Sewers for the City of London, these remarks may seem superfluous; the rather so, as the worst evils of tidal drainage are not largely exemplified within your jurisdiction. But it seems to me of extreme moment at the present time, when very costly improvements of the metropolitan drainage are about to undergo parliamentary discussion, that the public should be well aware how indispensable such improvements are for the general health of London, and how important, in fact, they are to thousands who at first sight might think themselves little interested in their completion. To some individual householder, dwelling at a high level, all concern in the subject may seem to terminate with the defluxion of his own sewage. So that his own pipes remain clear, little cares he for the ultimate outfall of his nuisance! Perhaps, if he knew better, he would care more. His gift returns to him with increase. Down in the valley, whither his refuse runs, converge innumerable kindred contributions. From city and suburb--from an area of a hundred square miles covered by a quarter of a million of houses, with their unprecedented throng of metropolitan life, there pours into that single channel every conceivable excrement, outscouring, garbage and refuse, from man and beast, street and slum, shamble and factory, market and hospital. From the polluted bosom of the river steam up, incessantly though unseen, the vapours of a retributive poison; densest and most destructive, no doubt, along the sodden banks and stinking sewers of lowest level; but spreading over miles of land--sometimes rolled high by wind, sometimes blended low with mist, and baneful, even to their margin that curls over distant fields. For, not alone in Rotherhithe and Newington--not alone along the Effra or the Fleet, are traced the evils of this great miasm. The deepest shadows of the cloud lie here; but its outskirts darken the distance, A fever hardly to be accounted for, an infantile sickness of undue malignity, a doctor’s injunction for change of air, may at times suggest to the dweller in our healthiest suburbs, that while draining his refuse to the Thames, he receives for requital some partial workings of the gigantic poison-bed which he has contributed to maintain.