Greetings, my friends.

Among the many technological wonders that separate your era from mine, one of the most remarkable, and yet least remarked-upon, is the ready provision—at least in the more developed nations—of clean drinking water. In my day, such provision was in its infancy. A handful of waterworks companies existed, which supplied water to industrial premises, and to a small number of domestic customers. The City and west end of London, for example, was supplied by the Chelsea Waterworks Company, which drew tidal water from the Thames: its principal reservoirs lay at Pimlico, on a site now occupied, I understand, by Victoria railway station. The water itself was unfiltered, and not infrequently offensive and foul to the taste. The greater part of the population, the middling sort and the poor, had little recourse even to provision of this kind, and had perforce to depend on the still less satisfactory facilities of public conduits and pumps, the services of water-carriers, or the river itself. Waterborne diseases, such as dysentery and cholera morbus, were rife. How this contrasts with the London of your day, in which clean, potable water is piped at a modest cost to every home.

All of which makes it the more worthy of comment that large numbers of people in your society choose not to avail themselves of this provision, but to purchase their drinking water in bottles from shops, at no little pecuniary expense, and at no little practical inconvenience. I speak here merely of the immediate expense and inconvenience to themselves: still greater is the cost to what you would call the environment, in terms of the manufacture and subsequent disposal of millions of plastic or glass bottles, and the carriage of the bottled water hundreds, or even thousands, of miles from its source to the place of sale.

There is a felicific calculus to be undertaken here, and it is not a complex one: the greatest happiness of the greatest number would undoubtedly be most readily achieved by the widespread consumption of tap water.

Why, then, should so many continue to buy their drinking water in bottles? It is because they have been led to believe that bottled water is purer in content and more beneficial to health and wellbeing than tap water. And which esteemed scientific and medical authorities have apprised them of this supposed fact? Why, none other than those merchants who are seeking to sell them the water in bottles.

A host of scientific and consumer reports have disputed this fiction. The Drinking Water Inspectorate conducts routine examinations of tap water in the United Kingdom, and routinely finds that the vast majority of public supplies meet their exacting standards of purity. A Minister of the Crown has declared that the amount of money spent on spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”. In the American United States, public campaigns such as those of Corporate Accountability International and Bottled Water Blues press the arguments for drinking tap water. Yet, despite a modest reduction brought about by the current economic crisis, bottled water continues to be produced, purchased and consumed in scarcely imaginable quantities.

The question is one of competing authorities. There is, of course, no fallacy in making reference to the opinion of this or that professional person in any case in which the forming a correct judgment is beyond one’s immediate competence. Frequently, in matters touching medical science, chemistry, astronomy, the mechanical arts, &c, no other course could be pursued. However, in such a case as the present, the fallacy is to believe that the interest of the merchants of bottled water is the same with one’s own; when in fact it is clear that the declared opinions of these merchants are in a peculiar degree liable to be tinged with falsity by the action of sinister interest. The truth is that the purveyors of falsity are listened to because they shout the most vociferously and the most constantly; and the fact that their mental poison is so fulsomely received can be ascribed only to intellectual weakness on the part of the promiscuous multitude.

It seems hardly a coincidence that the name of the most popular brand of bottled water, spelled in reverse, reads ‘naïve’. I trust that none of my readers can be characterised under such a head.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.