Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

suffer, not only in fact, but in opinion; and to a degree greatly over-proportioned to the expense that a radical remedy would cost.

The public safety ought to be the supreme law. How many personal, private and local considerations are offered to counteract the provisions now extant for keeping the city clean! They need not be mentioned, they occur to every man—no law does reach them ; they must exist, till a flood, or a stream, shall wash them all away—I refer to common sewers and other receptacles of filth.

Private receptacles of filth and putrefaction ought not to exist, if it is possible for the vigilance of law to remove them.

Stagnant waters may be drained off by canalling, or other means. In the city, in the hot months, water arrested in the gutters becomes highly offensive in a few hours.—

The only competent remedy for this nuisance is a perpetual current thro' the streets.

If the case of bringing such a stream into the city should amount to a million of dollars, it would be money well laid out.

It is not supposed that it would cost half the sum.—It is time that the question was determined, whether Philadelphia can be vindicated from the suspicion now entertained, that it is, from its local situation, inevitably exposed to a frequent return of malignant and pestilential disorders.

The business is now brought to a crisis—and if men of property will not come forward, and promote the objects contemplated, in a more efficient manner than by lotteries, and contracted subscriptions, hard wrung from their purses, they may repent when the value of their estates shall be sunk fifty per cent. or reduced to nothing.
A foreigner observed, one day in the beginning of August last, that the citizens of Philadelphia were the most active, industrious, and sagacious in acquiring wealth, of any people he had ever known, and he had travelled—but, added he, they are strangely improvident in grudging such a proportion, of their riches as would give a permanent value to their possessions; and in the end prove them to be true economists. The city, said he, is now threatened with a second visitation of the fever which proved such a scourge in 1793. The real loss of property sustained that year, amounted probably to a sum much more than sufficient to defray the expense of draining off all the stagnated waters in the neighborhood, and introducing streams from distant fountains that should perpetually flow thro', and wash all the streets and sewers of the city. Situations in Europe had, by these means, been rendered healthy, which before had proved grave-yards to all who attempted to reside in them.

These remarks might be enforced by a thousand considerations which result from a contemplation of the actual state of things in this city and neighborhood. I am one of those who believe that the malignant disorders under which we have suffered, were imported—but, at the same time, suppose that local causes have favored their dissemination.

Those causes may be removed or ameliorated and until something more competent to the occasion is done, we shall continue to