ABSTRACT
A filth-hardened inspector, witness to the worst industrializing Britain can offer, confesses to being shocked: in Merthyr Tydfil in 1853 human excrement, the ‘filthiest of filth’ is ‘everywhere’. The first circumstance that must strike every visitor at Merthyr is the extreme and universal dirtiness and wetness of the town. Merthyr presents one of the most strongly marked cases, of the evil so frequently observed, of allowing a village to grow into a town, without providing the means of civic organisation. It is the theory of laisser faire carried out to its legitimate conclusion. Drainage like Water Supply has been left to individual effort and with like results. The Merthyr Board of Health have now existed above two years but nothing like systematic drainage has been in all that time attempted, much less accomplished. A population living in such a strate of constant discomfort as that of Merythr cannot be safe.
