eal? Let this commission
investigate the houses he lives in; why, in his race,
tuberculosis is increasing; why he furnishes his enormous quota
to the chain-gang and the penitentiary. Observe the house he
must live in, the food that he must eat, and learn of all his
environments. The negro is with you for all time. He is what you
will make him and it is "up" to the white people to prevent him
from becoming a criminal and to guard him against tuberculosis,
syphilis, etc. _If he is tainted with disease you will suffer;
if he develops criminal tendencies you will be affected._

Will not the white South, eventually, in order to save itself from
disease, be forced to save its negroes from disease? It would seem an
inevitable conclusion.

_Private Interests in Public Murder_

Always and everywhere present are the private influences which work
against the public health. Individuals and corporations owning foul
tenements or lodging-houses resent, by all the evasions inherent in our
legal system, every endeavor to eliminate the perilous conditions from
which they take their profit. For the precious right to dump refuse into
streams and lakes, sundry factories, foundries, slaughter-houses, glue
works, and other necessary but unsavory industries send delegations to
the legislature and oppose the creation of any body having authority to
abate the nuisances.

Purveyors of bad milk decline to clean up their dairies until the
outbreak of some disease which they have been distributing by the can
brings down the authorities upon them. Could the general public but know
how often minor accesses of scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhoid
follow the lines of a specific milk route, there would be a tremendous
and universal impetus to the needed work of milk inspection. In this
respect the country is the enemy of the city: the country, which, with
its own overwhelming natural advantages, distributes and radiates what
disease it does foster among its urban neighbors, by sheer ignorance or
sheer obstinate resistance to the "new-fangled notions of science." Such
men as the late Colonel Waring of New York, Dr. Fulton of Baltimore, and
Dr. Wende of Buffalo have repeatedly pointed out the debt of death and
suffering which the city, often well organized against infections, owes
to the unorganized and uncaring rural districts. Reciprocity in health
matters can be represented, numerically, by the figure zero. It