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THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water.
And this without metaphor.
How, and in what manner?
Day and night. With what object?
With no object.
With what intention? With no intention.
Why?
For no reason.
By means of what organ? By means of its intestine.
What is its intestine?
The sewer.
Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure
which the valuations of special science have set upon it.
Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the
most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human
manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before
us. Not a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes
to town without bringing back with him, at the two extremities
of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth.
Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young
as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold
of the seed.
There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus
of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers.
Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city
to manure the plain.
If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold.
What is done with this golden manure?
It is swept into the abyss.
Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect
the dung of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable
element of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea.
All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, restored
to the land instead of being cast into the water, would suffice
to nourish the world.
Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of
mud which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks
of the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean
mire, which the pavements hide from you,--do you know what they
are? They are the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme,
thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied
bellows of great oxen in the evening, they are perfumed hay, they
are golden wheat, they are the bread on your table, they are the
warm blood in your veins, they are health, they are joy, they
are life. This is the will of that mysterious creation which is
transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.
Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow
forth from it.
The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.
You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider
me ridiculous to boot.
This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.
Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit
of half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths
of her rivers.
Note this:
with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter of the
expenses of our budget.
The cleverness of man is such that he prefers to get rid of
these five hundred millions in the gutter.
It is the very substance of the people that is carried off,
here drop by drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour
of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic collection of
our rivers into the ocean.
Every hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs.
From this spring two results, the land impoverished, and the
water tainted.
Hunger arising from the furrow, and disease from the stream.
It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the
Thames is poisoning London.
So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable
of late, to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below
the last bridge.
A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,
sucking up and driving back, a system of elementary drainage,
simple as the lungs of a man, and which is already in full working
order in many communities in England, would suffice to conduct
the pure water of the fields into our cities, and to send back
to the fields the rich water of the cities, and this easy exchange,
the simplest in the world, would retain among us the five hundred
millions now thrown away.
People are thinking of other things.
The process actually in use does evil, with the intention
of doing good. The intention is good, the result is melancholy.
Thinking to purge the city, the population is blanched like
plants raised in cellars. A sewer is a mistake.
When drainage, everywhere, with its double function, restoring
what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a simple
impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data
of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened.
Add the suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.
In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river,
and leakage takes place.
Leakage is the word.
Europe is being ruined in this manner by exhaustion.
As for France, we have just cited its figures.
Now, Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the total population
of France, and Parisian guano being the richest of all, we understate
the truth when we value the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five
millions in the half milliard which France annually rejects.
These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment,
would double the splendor of Paris.
The city spends them in sewers.
So that we may say that Paris's great prodigality, its wonderful
festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its stream of gold from
full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence, is its sewer
system.
It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political
economy, we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost
in the gulfs the well-being of all.
There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.
Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus:
Paris is a spendthrift.
Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged capitals,
of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that metropolis
of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of impulse
and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that nation-city,
that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of Babylon
and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders,
from the point of view which we have just indicated.
Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.
Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless
waste, Paris is itself an imitator.
These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this
is no young folly.
The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"
says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman
peasant."
When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome
exhausted Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she
poured in Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome
has engulfed the world.
This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the
universe.
Urbi et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.
Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.
Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar
to intelligent towns.
For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of
which we have just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another
Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads,
its squares, its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation,
which is of mire and minus the human form.
For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where
there is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity;
and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city
of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels,
it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.
However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic
sink of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized
in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau,
grandiose vileness.
The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface,
would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore.
A sponge has no more partitions and ducts than the mound of
earth for a circuit of six leagues round about, on which rests
the great and ancient city. Not to mention its catacombs, which
are a separate cellar, not to mention the inextricable trellis-work
of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast tubular system for the
distribution of fresh water which ends in the pillar fountains,
the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work under the
two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding thread.
There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the
product to which Paris has given birth.
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