It is estimated that our present wasteful method of disposing of the night-soil occasions an annual money loss to the country of over $100,000,000. When the economic value of human excreta becomes as well known in the United States as it is in China and Japan we will cease to cast it into the sea.
=A Truthful Picture.=--Any one who has lived among or mingled much with people in the country and in hamlets and villages will recognize the truthfulness of the following picture as presented by George E. Waring, Jr., in “How to Drain a House.” He says:
“Let us see what chance a woman living in the country has to escape the direst evils that ‘delicate health’ has in store for its victims. The privy stands perhaps at the bottom of the garden, fifty yards from the house, approached by a walk bordered by long grass, which is always wet except during the sunny part of the day, overhung by shrubbery and vines, which are often dripping with wet. In winter, snow-drifts block the way, and during rain there is no shelter from any side. The house itself is fearfully cold, if not drifted half-full with snow or flooded with rain.
“A woman who is comfortably housed during stormy weather will, if it is possible, postpone for days together the dreadful necessity for exposure that such conditions imply. If the walk is exposed to a neighboring workshop window, the visit will probably be put off until dark. In either case, no amount of reasoning will convince a woman that it is her duty, for the sake of preventing troubles of which she is yet ignorant, to expose herself to the danger, the discomfort, and the annoyance that regularity under such circumstances implies.
“I pass over now the barbarous foulness and the stifling odor of the privy-vault. It is only as an unavoidable evil that these have been tolerated; but I cannot too strongly urge attention to the point taken above, and insist on the fact that every consideration of humanity, and of the welfare not only of your own families, but of the whole community, demands a speedy reform of this abuse. * * * I make no apology for calling the attention of women themselves to this important matter, believing that they will universally concede that, however much of elegance and comfort may surround them in the appointments of their homes, their mode of life is neither decent, civilized, nor safe, unless they are provided with the conveniences that the water-closet and the earth-closet alone make possible.”