spits on the floor of a building
wherein people live or work is more of an actual peril, in that one foul
act, than the leper in his whole stricken life. The twin shames of
venereal disease, blinked by every health board in the country (Detroit
possibly deserves a partial exception) are, in their effect upon the
race, in blindness, deafness, idiocy, and death so dreadful a menace
to-day, that consumption alone can march beside them in the leadership
of the destroyers. Typhoid, so easily conquerable, claims its annual
thousands of sacrificed victims. And the slaughter of the innocents goes
endlessly on, recorded only in the dire figures of infant mortality.
To-day, as I write, the whole nation is thrilled with horror at the
tragedy of 150 young lives snuffed out in a needless school panic in
Cleveland. Had my pen the power, perhaps I could thrill the nation with
horror over the more dreadful fact that some 1100 children under five
years of age die yearly in Fall River, the vast majority of them
sacrificed to bad food and living conditions that might better be called
dying conditions. One half of the total mortality of that busy,
profit-yielding city is among children under five years of age,
two-fifths among children under one year. Does no baneful light shine
from those figures?

Yet, over and above the minor discouragements, failures, and set-backs,
looms the tremendous fact of a universal and gathering movement. It is
still, in any general sense, inchoate, and, except in certain specific
relations, invertebrate. But one cannot follow the work of the public
health guardians without feeling the cumulative force of progress. As I
have said, the newspapers have been a vital element in awaking the
public. Associations are being formed the country over for the
prevention of disease. There is a steady increase in the power and
authority of those officially charged with hygienic control. Makers of
deleterious or poisonous foods, and the vultures who prey on the sick
through fraudulent patent medicines are being curbed by pure food and
drug laws. Milk inspection is saving the lives of more children every
year, as meat inspection is prolonging the lives of the poor. Definite
instances of progress are almost startling: the fact that Massachusetts
has so purified its public waters that for a year there has been no
typhoid epidemic ascribable to any public supply; the passage of a
radical law in Indiana which forbids the marriage