increased intelligence has been to
demand better wages and to combine for the enforcement of his demands.
The premium placed upon intelligence has led both the broader-minded,
more progressive, and more humane among employers, and the more
intelligent among employees, to recognize the commercial value of
health, and of sanitary surroundings, comfort, and healthy recreations,
as a means of promoting this. The combined results of these forces are
seen in the incontestable, living fact that the death-rate from
tuberculosis among intelligent artisans and in well-regulated factory
suburbs is already below that of many classes of outdoor and even farm
laborers, whose day is from twelve to fourteen hours, and whose children
are worked, and often overworked, from the time that they can fairly
walk alone, with as disastrous and stunting results as can be found in
any mine or factory. Child-labor is one of the oldest of our racial
evils, instead of, as we often imagine, the newest.

All over the civilized world to-day the average general death-rate of
each city, slums included, is now below that of many rural districts in
the same country. If I were to be asked to name the one factor which had
done more than any other to check the spread and diminish the death-rate
from tuberculosis I should unhesitatingly say, the _marked increase of
wages among the great producing masses of the country_, with the
consequent increased abundance of food, better houses, better sanitary
surroundings, and last, but not least, shorter hours of labor.

_Underfeeding and overwork are responsible for more deaths from
tuberculosis than any other ten factors._ Rest and abundant feeding are
the only known means for its cure.

This is one of the reasons why the medical profession has abandoned all
thought of endeavoring to fight the disease single-handed, and is
striving and straining every nerve to enlist the whole community in the
fight. Its burden rests, not upon the unfortunate individual who has
become tuberculous, but _upon the community_ which, by its ignorance,
its selfishness, and its greed, has done much to make him so. What
civilization has _caused_ it is under the most solemn obligation to
_cure_.

* * * * *

One more brigade of irregular troops on the extreme left remains to be
briefly reviewed, and that is those forces resulting from the successive
exposure of generations to the physical influences of civil