CITY SEWERAGE.
Not as a paid professional man, but con amove, and with his usual spirit, and hi his exceedingly unusual language, Mr Millar, E.S.A., is once more before the public, enunciating his views on his favorite subject-—the important one of city sewerage. Though it is possible that there may be room enough for the practical exercise of his skill and experience in the smaller field of Wangunui, of which he is now a resident, as guide, philospher, and friend to its inhabitants, Mr Millar cannot readily forget the larger field in which he labored long, the City of Dunedin, and through the columns of one of the local papers he has had leave to fight his battles o er again with the Council, and those among the community whom he failed to convince in days of yore. To use his own unique style of diction : —“ I had long since determined not to interefere in Dunedin municipal matters; but like the old war horse at the sound of the trumpet’s charge, of sewerage difficulties, chiefly with
I for the nonce waive my previous resolution, to comment on the present state a view of reminding the present occupants of civic offices of what took place in the past, i.e., before their official time. This I do with a singleness of purpose, in the interests of a City with which my professional works are indelibly connected—a City I may, with much justice and without egotism, pronounce as one of my own formation, as the memory of a worthy Old Identity, the present Mayor, will testify.” And thereupon Mr Millar enters the battlefield as a horse, or, rather as a host consisting of several dense columns —a veritable phalanx, strong in the armor (if we may be permitted to imitate his eccentric form of metaphor) of wise saws and modem instances. The wise saws are bis own ; the modem instances are mostly quotations from brother engineers ; and they are apt enough, as well as numerous, and are worthy of being reprinted in such a City as this, where sewerage is a question of as much importance as in any city in the Colony. These, or some of them, we may quote at another time, for local application. Meantime, Mr Millar may. excuse us if we illustrate only the emphasis with which he addresses tyros in the profession, or amateurs who dare to deal with questions of the kind. Referring to the questions of Mr Rawlinson, C.E., on the system of town sewerage, and the emptying of these into harbors, as carried out in England, he exclaims : —“ Hear that, ‘ city surveyors,’ who would be thought ‘ city engineers inchoate youngsters, totally innocent of either Home or Colonial practice in sanitary engineering, more than may be gleaned out of “ Lothan’s Rudimentary Essays on Sewerage,” but who are getting a smattering of your professions at the public expense! Mark, learn, ahd inwardly digest the for your own profit, and the economic outlay of the funds of your clients, as an important practical truth, laid down by Mr Rawlinson, a father in the profession, and one of the first sanitary authorities in the world. A blood-thirsty ruffian commits a single murder, is hunted down, caught, tried, convicted by a jury of his country, and hanged as an atonement to society for liis crime ; whilst a professional homicide, let him be medical, surgical, or engineering, committing an error of judgment whereby the many suffer disease and death, that ’delinquent charlatan escapes under the mystic letters M.D., M.R.0.5., C.E., attached to his name Alas! under such a regime , the initials C. E. become foetid in the nostrils of Colonial life, as professional prostitution.” And, in a voice of warning which should reach Wellington as well as Dunedin, at a time when in both places the same question is under discussion, he asks: “ Shall it come to this—that the civic authorities of a City heretofore looked upon as the most progressive in the 1 Britain of the South,’ are become so purblind, so degenerate, as to approve of obsolete and heretical doctrines so far behind the age in "which it is their privilege to live, move, and have their civic being ? I conjure you to use with unsparing band your power and pen, and save these gentlemen from themselves. Show them that they are, as conservators of the public health, presumed to govern for the time being, and for the well-being of the citizens at large. Further, that they are not to presume upon their civic position, conferred upon them by the people, to run posterity into debt for creating an heritage of foul stinks obnoxious alike to both sight and smell; such as will entail, if persevered in, a life of disease upon generations yet unborn.”
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Evening Star, Issue 3516, 1 June 1874, Page 3
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796CITY SEWERAGE. Evening Star, Issue 3516, 1 June 1874, Page 3
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