r Health.=--One cannot always keep well and strong
by his own efforts. The grocer and milkman may sell to you bad food, the
town may furnish impure water, churches and schools may injure your
health by failing to supply fresh air in their buildings. More than a
hundred thousand people were made very sick last year through the use of
water poisoned by waste matter which other persons carelessly let reach
the streams and wells. Many of the sick died of the fever caused by this
water. Although it cannot be said that we are engaged in real war, yet
we are surely killing one another by our thoughtless habits in
scattering disease. We must therefore not only know how to care for our
own bodies, but teach all to help one another to keep well.

=A Lesson from War.=--The mention of war makes those who know its
terrors shudder. Disease has caused more than ten times as much
suffering and death as war with its harvest of mangled bodies,
shattered limbs, and blinded eyes. In our four months' war with Spain
in 1898 only 268 soldiers were killed in battle, while nearly 4000
brave men died from disease. We lost more than ten men by disease to
every one killed by bullets.

In the late war between Japan and Russia the Japanese soldiers cared
for their health so carefully that only one fourth as many died from
disease as perished in battle. This shows that with care for the
health the small men of Japan saved themselves from disease, and thus
won a victory told around the world.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--The Surgeon General who, by keeping the
soldiers well, helped Japan win in the war against Russia.]

=The Battle with Disease.=--For long ages sickness has caused more
sorrow, misery, and death than famine, war, and wild beasts. Many
years ago a plague called the _black death_ swept over most of the
earth, and killed nearly one third of the inhabitants. A little more
than a hundred years ago yellow fever killed thousands of people in
Philadelphia and New York in a few weeks. When Boston was a city with
a population of 11,000, more than one half of the persons had smallpox
in one year. Within a few years one half of the sturdy red men of our
forests were slain by smallpox when it first visited our shores.
Before the year 1798 few boys or girls reached the age of twenty years
without a pit-marked face due to the dreadful disease of smallpox.
This disease was formerly more common than measles and chicken pox now
are because we had not ye