, tornadoes, floods, and other "acts of God," if not
directly, at least by inference It is plain enough, at any rate, that
those who draw up the contract consider strikes and lockouts as wholly
outside of their control, as they do the elements. It is the same old
ignorance, the same desire to shift the blame.

WHO IS TO BLAME?

Modern business common sense counts strikes and lockouts among preventable
industrial diseases, just as the modern science of medicine classes
smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, the plague, tuberculosis, and the
hookworm amongst preventable bodily diseases. The strike is a violent
eruption, according to those who have made the closest study of the
situation, resulting from long-continued abuses of bad management, bad
selection, bad assignment of duties, and other vicious or ignorant
practices. So a fever is a kind of physical house cleaning for the removal
of debris of months or even years of foolish living.

But persistent violation of the laws of health does not always lead to
acute disease. Seated in the office of a prominent and successful
physician in a Western city one day, we were discussing with him the true
nature of disease. "My patients," said he, "many of them are now lying on
beds of pain, burning with fever. They are called sick people. The folks
walking along the street out there are called well people. The terms are
inaccurate. Fever is the effort of nature to throw off poisons, poisons
which have been accumulating in the system for years as the result of
wrong ways of living. Many people suppose that fevers are caused by germs.
This is not true. No germ can harm or disturb a healthy body. It is only
when the body is depleted in vitality that its defenses come down and
germs find a ready soil in which to propagate. People who have fevers,
therefore, are only taking a violent manner of getting well, and, if
wisely treated and intelligently nursed, they do get well. As you know, it
is a very common experience for a person to feel far better after recovery
from a spell of sickness than he has for years previously. Now, nine out
of ten of the people going along the street who call themselves well are
not well. The majority of them are probably only 25 per cent, efficient
physically. They are loaded up with the debilitating consequences of their
own recklessness or ignorant manner of living."

A PROLIFIC CAUSE OF INEFFICIENCY

In the same way, there are latent illnesses and ine