PRESIDENTIAL ADDEESS — SECTION H. 397 



My hearers will bear with me while I say, further, that 

 manhood- suffrage and vote by ballot are imperial agencies. 

 And every day sees arising more acutely the demand that no 

 effort must be spared to educate the people and bring them up 

 to a truer perception than they now exhibit of the requirements 

 and laws of social existence. I am encouraged to believe that, 

 as time goes on, our national school-systems will bear their 

 due results. Much, however, must necessarily depend on that 

 education being directed in channels which are soundly practi- 

 cal, whether or not the object be secured of making the 

 people more plastic to those needful reforms which find their 

 base in legislative enactments. 



There are two lines, so far as sanitation is concerned, on 

 which the ideas of the public ought to be made to run, and 

 upon which an intellectual habit should be formed. The first 

 is to regard society as an organic whole ; and the second, to 

 obtain intelligent notions of natural sanitary laws. There are 

 few directions in which it is more important to view our social 

 relations as an organized whole than in that of sanitation. 

 Society has a life of its own, which is yet dependent on the 

 health and vigour of its individual members. This is strikingly 

 so, so far as the social body in its sanitary aspects is concerned. 

 Diseases of the severest type have their hunting-ground in 

 the social organism. As individuals living apart or in iso- 

 lation men would be practically free from them, but as 

 units in close social relations diseases of the most formidable 

 nature afflict us. In several aspects of public health, sanitary 

 reformers have risen to the conception of a national life ; and 

 what I contend is that the people who constitute the social 

 organism, and who in these colonies seek to govern them- 

 selves, must also rise to the perception of the same great truth. 

 The idea of a " national life " must not be limited merely to 

 influences that arise out of our modern complex industrial 

 system, but take in every condition arising out of all 

 phases of the social relationship. If such a conception 

 once gained an entrance to the public mind, and became a 

 conscious precept of the public understanding, many of 

 the difficulties which now surround sanitary legislation, and 

 bar the way to a higher sanitary standard, would speedily 

 disappear. 



The second broad line on which reform should run is 

 through the instrumentality of our national school-systems. 

 It is in the school where the seeds of knowledge must be sown. 

 And it is an assuring fact that the knowledge which sanitary 

 reformers desiderate so seriously in the public generally can be 

 taught amid other school subjects to the young. We find 

 the kindred topics of elementary physiology, chemistry, and 

 physics now taking their place in the school curriculum, and 



