THE PRIVATE WELL AND PRIVY VAULT

THE PRIVATE WELL AND PRIVY VAULT

Can the Public Afford to Tolerate These Menaces?—The Financial Side of the Question—The Matter of the Public Health Necessity of Screening and Sterilization where No Sewers Exist

IT is a far cry from the privy council to the privy I vault, and still they are both Anglo-Saxon institutions dating from time immemorial, and both, as institutions, are very much alive and kicking in the 20th century. It would appear, however, that in England, the home of the privy council, that the privy vault was, comparatively speaking, very much eliminated or reduced to a state of innocuous desuetude by good sanitary methods. By the time we reach England’s death rate from typhoid fever we can very well say the same of ourselves, but not until then. Why we should speak of the private well and privy vault, strikes me as rather strange so far as the adjective is concerned. If there was really such a thing as a private well, or a private vault, or a privy well, or a privy vault, in the literal sense, I should not be reading this paper today. In fact, we find that the well and the vault are often so close together that there is a certain ineffable unity which produces a result to the community which is, so to speak, ineluctable.