258 BOARD OF A.GRICULTURE. ' [Jail., 



All diseases are more prevalent and sweeping, wherever they 

 occur, since clean streams are the exception and filth has become 

 the rule. In the multitude of general and wholesale causes for 

 disease the people are being taught to believe themselves at the 

 mercy of inscrutable, malarial waves, and find little interest or 

 hope in local and personal reform. 



So long as our leaders and masters in money-making are in good 

 health and getting rich, why should they lead in reform? In the 

 pride of their strength, these captains of industry slap their broad 

 chests with Louis XIV, and cry: "The State! — it is me! " In a 

 republic this is language for every citizen. 



If work-people are sick, what are the odds to our profits so long 

 as a fresh crowd of workmen stand ready to fill vacant places ? 

 The teeming millions of a nasty old world hang like a cloud over 

 any fresh development of cleanliness in this. Old-style family 

 labor grew in strength by marriage, and home industry, and long 

 years of steady habits, tending to hereditary virtues. Slavery at 

 the south had to buy or raise its labor with considerable care, and 

 epidemics in laborers' quarters lost the owners a rousing sum in 

 cash. Now, you or I can set a thousand full-grown men at work 

 to-morrow on credit, without risking a dollar upon their health; 

 and capital may discharge a disabled or unprofitable army of 

 scattered work-people any day, without particular odium. 



In respect to stream pollution, we grow more and more careless. 

 The fathers of concentrated industry had a few grains of farm 

 economy. They cast their stale bread upon the waters expecting 

 it would return in fish. But the fish come now in cans or salted 

 from streams we have yet set no mill on. 



Being a law-abiding people as long as we can stand it, oughtn't 

 we to quote something legal right here to show that the present 

 outrageous abuse of our streams has not the first legal leg to 

 stand on? 



Says Judge Potter (xiii, E. I., p. 611): "The right of every 

 owner of land bordering on a stream to the use of the water is 

 well settled; and the fact that he also owns a mill does not lessen 

 his rights. Prima facie, he owns to the center of the stream, and 

 if he owns on both sides, owns the whole of the land under it; and 

 he has the right to have the water pass his land in its natural, 

 pure state. . . . This court can not alter the law. Nor can the 



