convinced of the truth of the
Darwinian theory. Charleston, lovely, romantic, peaceful Charleston,
swept by ocean breezes and the highest death rate of any considerable
American city; breathing serenely the perfume of its flowers and the
bacilli of its in-bred tuberculosis; Charleston, so delightful to the
eye, so surprising to the nose!

By accident Charleston got an efficient health officer not long ago. A
deserved epidemic of smallpox had descended upon the unvaccinated
negroes and scared the tranquil city. Dr. J. Mercier Green was called
from private practice to tackle the situation. For weeks he waded in the
gore of lacerated arms, and his path through darkest Charleston could be
followed by rising and falling waves of Afro-American ululations; but he
checked the epidemic, and when three months later the city physician
died, he got the place. Now, had Dr. Green been wise in his generation,
he would have been content to keep his municipal patient reasonably free
from smallpox and live a quiet life. But he straightway manifested an
exasperating interest in other ailments. He stirred up the matter of the
water supply, regardless of the fact that all Charleston's
great-great-grandfather had drunk water from polluted cisterns and died
of typhoid as a gentleman should. He pitched into doctors nearly old
enough to be his own great-great-grandfather because they failed to
report diseases properly. He answered back, in the public prints, the
unanswerable Good-Old-Way argument. He opined, quite openly, that there
was too much tuberculosis, too high an infant mortality, too prevalent a
habit of contagious disease, and he more than hinted that the city
itself was at fault.

In the matter of the cisterns, for instance. Charleston now has a good
city water supply, fairly free from contamination where it starts, and
safely filtered before it reaches the city. But a great many of "our
best citizens" prefer their own cisterns, on the grandfather principle.
These are underground, for the most part, and are regularly supplied
from the roof-drainage. Also, they are intermittently supplied by
leakage from adjacent privy-vaults, Charleston having a very rudimentary
and fractional sewerage-system. Therefore typhoid is not only logical
but inevitable. I have no such revolutionary contempt for private rights
as to deny the privilege of any gentleman to drink such form of sewage
as best pleases him; but when it comes to supplying the publ