Page 2113 - les-miserables

sider 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 hun-
dred 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 riv-
ers into the ocean. Every hiccough of our sewers costs us a
thousand francs. From this spring two results, the land im-
poverished, 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 elemen-
tary drainage, simple as the lungs of a man, and which is
already in full working order in many communities in Eng-
land, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields
into our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich wa-
ter 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.

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