DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES OF MODERN LIFE 335 



has not been studied in any comprehensive and thorough manner, unless 

 we may say that the Japanese have done it, since the days of Juvenal 

 who gave us the immortal sentiment ' mens sana in corpore sano.' 



If twentieth-century civilization is to make further advance, if our 

 beloved country is to be much longer inhabited by Americans, if in 

 short the present Anglo-Saxon race is not to die out, steps must be 

 taken to study the conditions of existence and ascertain what measures 

 must be adopted to prevent the terrible waste of human life, now going 

 on without let or hindrance. We are wasteful of many things, but of 

 nothing else are we so wasteful as of human life. And most of this 

 waste is entirely preventable. President Mayo said at the last meet- 

 ing of the American Medical Association that a sufferer from typhoid 

 fever has as good a right to sue the city where he contracted the 

 filthy complaint as though he had hurt himself by a fall on a defective 

 pavement, and yet we read in the newspapers of epidemics of typhoid 

 fever just broken out in Cincinnati, Newark and other places. Were it 

 outbreak of rinderpest or foot- and mouth-disease, stringent means 

 would be at once taken to stop it and all the forces of the government 

 would be enlisted to save cattle or sheep that have a market value. But 

 human beings may die of typhoid fever, as our soldiers did in Camp 

 Thomas, and no one be called to account; and yet we call ourselves a 

 civilized and a God-fearing nation. Verily our brother's blood shall 

 be required at our hands. 



Lyman Abbott said in his baccalaureate sermon at Cambridge 

 that we are entering a period of fraternalism : " There has been 

 autocracy and individualism, but the new life shall be one not of 

 socialism, nor communism, but of fraternalism." We are the keepers 

 of our brother's body, his health, his happiness, his children and his 

 chance to develop and to work out his destiny. We can not escape this 

 responsibility. Knowing its duty, our government must do it and 

 will do it. 



Does any one doubt the possible value of government interference 

 in the hygiene of daily life? If so, let him reflect on the diminished 

 death-rate from tuberculosis since the treatment of the disease by fresh 

 air, sunlight and an improved dietary has been so largely inaugurated. 

 The death-rate from this disease in the United States has fallen in 

 twenty years from about 40 per 10,000 of the population annually to 

 about 18 per 10,000, and there is every reason to believe that it can be 

 reduced still lower. The returns furnished in the German tuber- 

 culosis congress show a decrease of 38 per cent, in deaths from phthisis 

 in Germany since 1875. The German insurance companies from 

 1901 to 1905 spent over $9,000,000 in fighting the disease and in estab- 

 lishing thirty-six sanatoria. These sanatoria, together with strict in- 

 spection and enforcement of sanitary regulations in that country, are 



