occasionally happens that the conflict between private and public
interests assumes an obviously amusing phase. The present admirable Food
and Drug Department of the Indiana board was not established without
considerable opposition. One of the chief objectors was a member of the
legislature, who made loud lamentation regarding the expense. Up rose
another legislator, all primed for the fight, and asked if the objector
would answer a few questions. The objector consented.

"Do you know the W---- baking-powder?"

"Yes."

"Do you know that it would naturally come to the food laboratory for
analysis, were such a laboratory established?"

"I suppose it might."

"Do you know that the W---- baking-powder is 20 per cent. clay?"

"No."

"Would it surprise you to learn that it contained a high percentage of
clay?"

No answer.

"Are you counsel for the W---- Baking Powder Co.?"

"Yes."

"That's all."

It was enough. The bill passed.

Everybody's health is nobody's business. There, as I see it, is the bane
of the whole situation at present. To be sure, epidemics occasionally
wake us up. And, really, an epidemic is a fine thing for a city to have.
It is the only scourge that drives us busy Americans to progress. It
took an epidemic of typhoid, a shameful and dreadful one, to teach
Ithaca that it must not drink filth. Only after Scranton faced a
thousand cases of the fever did it assert itself and demand protection
for its water supply. New Orleans would probably be having (and
concealing) yellow fever yet, but for the paralysis of fright which the
onset of three years ago caused. Boston's fine system of medical
inspection in the schools is the outcome of a diphtheria scare. Smallpox
is a splendid stimulator of vaccination; so much so that some of the
country's leading sanitarians now advocate the abolition of pest-houses
for this avoidable ailment, and dependence upon the vaccine virus alone.

But epidemics are only the guerrilla attacks of the general enemy. It is
in the diseases always with us that the peril lies. Tuberculosis,
carrying off ten per cent. of the entire nation, and making its worst
ravages upon those in the prime of life, is a more terrible foe than was
ever smallpox, or cholera, or yellow fever, or any of the grisly
sounding bugaboos. Why, not so long ago, three highly civilized States
went into quite a little frenzy over a poor dying wretch of a leper who
had got loose; whereas every man that