injurious to health, but calculated, under certain circumstances, to
prove highly beneficial to us. The offensiveness and noxiousness look
very much like a direct command from the Author of Nature, to do that
which shall turn the refuse to a good account--namely, to bury it in
the earth. Yet, from sloth and negligence, it is often allowed to
cumber the surface, and there do its evil work instead. An important
principle is thus instanced--the essential identity of Nuisance and
Waste. Nearly all the physical annoyances we are subjected to, and
nearly all the influences that are operating actively for our hurt,
are simply the exponents of some chemical solecism, which we are,
through ignorance or indifference, committing or permitting. There is
here a double evil--a positive and a negative. When the Londoner
groans at the smokiness of his streets, and the particles of soot he
finds spread over his shirt, his toilet-table, and every nice article
of furniture he possesses, he has the additional vexation of knowing,
that the smoke and soot should have been serving a useful purpose as
fuel. When he passes by a railway over the tops of the houses in some
mean suburb, and looks down with horror and disgust on the pools and
heaps of filth which are allowed to encumber the yards, courts, and
narrow streets of these localities, to the destruction of the health
of the inhabitants, he has a second consideration before him, that all
these matters ought to be in the care of some easy-acting system, by
which, removed to the fields, they should be helping to create the
means of life, instead of death. We never can look upon a great
factory chimney pouring forth its thick column of smoke, without a
twin grief--for the disgust it creates, and the good that is lost by
it. Properly, that volatile fuel should be doing duty in the furnace,
and effecting a saving to the manufacturer, instead of rendering him
and his concerns a nuisance to all within five miles.