12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bridge received state-approval. So too with prevention of disease. It 

 matters not that under the management or dictation of state-agents 

 some of the worst evils occur : as when the lives of eighty-seven wives 

 and children of soldiers are sacriliced in the ship Accrington ; * or 

 as when typhoid fever and diphtheria are diffused by a state-ordered 

 drainage system, as in Edinburgh ; f or as when officially-enforced, 

 sanitary appliances, ever getting out of order, increase the evils they 

 were to decrease. \ These and multitudinous such facts leave un- 

 abated the confidence Avith which sanitary inspection is invoked — in- 

 voked, indeed, more than ever, as is shown in the recent suggestion 

 that all public schools should be under the supervision of health-offi- 

 cers. Nay, even when the state has manifestly caused the mischief 

 complained of, faith in its beneficent agency is not at all diminished ; 

 as we see in the fact that, having a generation ago authorized, or 

 rather required, towns to establish drainage systems which delivered 

 sewage into the rivers, and having thus polluted the sources of water- 

 supply, the water-companies have come to be daily denounced for the 

 impurities of their water ; and, as the only remedy, there follows the 

 demand that the state by its local proxies shall undertake the whole 

 business. The state's misdoings become, as in the case of industrial 

 dwellings, reasons for praying it to do more. 



This work of the Legislature is, in one respect, indeed, less excus- 

 able than the fetich-worship to which I have tactily compared it. The 

 savage has the defense that his fetich is silent — does not confess its in- 

 ability. But the civilized man persists in ascribing to this idol, made 

 with his own hands, powers which in one way or other it confesses it 

 has not got. I do not mean merely that the debates daily tell us of 

 legislative measures which have done evil instead of good ; nor do I 

 mean merely that the thousands of acts of Parliament which repeal 

 preceding acts are so many tacit admissions of failure. Neither do I 

 refer only to such 5'?<a5«-governmental confessions as that contained in 

 the report of the Poor-Law Commissioners, who said that " we find, 

 on the one hand, that there is scarcely one statute connected with the 

 administration of public relief which has produced the effect designed 

 by the Legislature, and that the majority of them have created new 

 evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent." 

 I refer rather to those made by statesmen, and by state-departments. 

 Here, for example, in a memorial addressed to Mr. Gladstone, and 



* Hansard, vol. clvi, p. 718, and vol. clvii, p. 4464. 



f Letter of an Edinburgh M. D. in the " Times" of January 17, 1876, verifying other 

 testimonies : one of which I have previously cited concerning Windsor, where, as in 

 Edinburgh, there was absolutely no typhoid in the undrained parts, while it was very 

 fatal in the drained parts. — " Study of Sociology," chap, i, notes. 



\ I say this partly from personal knowledge ; having now before me memoranda made 

 twenty-five years ago concerning such results produced under my own observaiion. Veri- 

 fying facts have recently been given by Sir Richard Cross in the "Nineteenth Century" 

 for January, 1884, p. 155. 



