[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Where water must be pumped and carried by hand much strength and nerve force are expended which might be kept for more important work]

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A “brook put to work” may be utilized in supplying water to a farmhouse]

From a consideration of water supply we pass naturally to questions of the disposal of waste, and here again is found a subject too often neglected both in town and in rural communities.  In the city the problems are not individual ones in the main, but rather questions of the best management and use of the public utilities concerned.  Does the average city householder know what becomes of the waste removed from his door by the convenient arrival of the ash man, the garbage man, the rubbish man?  Does he know whether this waste is disposed of in the most sanitary way?  Does he consider whether it is removed in such a way as to be inoffensive and without danger to the people through whose streets it is carried?  Does he know anything of the cost to the city of waste disposal?  Is it merely an expense, and a heavy one, for him in common with other taxpayers to bear?  Or is the business made to pay for itself?  If not, is it possible to make it pay?  Does any community make the waste account balance itself at the end of the year?

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  An objectionable garbage wagon.  Disposal of waste is a subject too often neglected both in urban and in rural communities]

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  This new covered garbage wagon subjects the public to no danger]

In the country, once more we face the individual problem rather than that of the community.  Here proper provision for the disposal of waste often necessitates more knowledge of the subject than is possessed by the homemaker, or sometimes it requires the installation of apparatus whose cost seems prohibitive.  A careful consideration of these matters will possibly disclose the fact that a smaller expenditure may accomplish the desired purpose.  Or, if this is not true, it may be found that the end accomplished is worth the expenditure of what seemed a prohibitive sum.  A water closet, for instance, has not only a sanitary but a moral value.  We must somehow educate people to understand and to believe that the basis of family health and usefulness is proper living conditions, and that some system of sewage and garbage disposal is a necessary step toward proper living conditions.  With the urban population these matters are removed from personal and immediate consideration, but every rural homemaker must face his own problems, with the knowledge that since his conditions are individual his solution must be equally his own.