relation to the
extension of law. It is desirable and inevitable that the sphere of law
should be extended, and that the disputes which are still decided by
brutal and unreasoning force should be decided by humane and reasoning
force, that is to say, by law. But, side by side with this extension of
law, it is necessary to wage a constant war with the law-making
tendency, to cherish an undying resolve to maintain unsullied those
sacred and intimate impulses, all the finest activities of the moral
sphere, which the generalizing hand of law can only injure and stain.

It is these fascinating and impassioning problems, every day becoming of
more urgent practical importance, which it is the task of Social Hygiene
to solve, having first created the men and women who are fit to solve
them. It is such problems as these that we are to-day called upon to
illuminate, as far as we may--it may not yet be very far--by the dry
light of science.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Muralt, _Lettres sur les Anglais_. Lettre V.

[2] In the reign of Richard II (1388) an Act was passed for "the
punishment of those which cause corruption near a city or great town to
corrupt the air." A century later (in Henry VII's time) an Act was
passed to prevent butchers killing beasts in walled towns, the preamble
to this Act declaring that no noble town in Christendom should contain
slaughter-houses lest sickness be thus engendered. In Charles II's time,
after the great fire of London, the law provided for the better paving
and cleansing of the streets and sewers. It was, however, in Italy, as
Weyl points out (_Geschichte der Sozialen Hygiene im Mittelalter_, at a
meeting of the Gesellschaft fuer Soziale Medizin, May 25, 1905), that the
modern movement of organized sanitation began. In the thirteenth century
the great Italian cities (like Florence and Pistoja) possessed _Codici
Sanitarii_; but they were not carried out, and when the Black Death
reached Florence in 1348, it found the city altogether unprepared. It
was Venice which, in the same year, first initiated vigorous State
sanitation. Disinfection was first ordained by Gian Visconti, in Milan,
in 1399. The first quarantine station of which we hear was established
in Venice in 1403.

[3] The rate of infant mortality in England and Wales has decreased from
149 per 1000 births in 1871-80 to 127 per 1000 births in 1910. In
reference to this remarkable fall which has taken place _pari passu_
with the fall in th