1032 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 
as failure, not because the tenor or aim of the law is defective, 
but because the State looks for intelligence, sympathy, and action 
in those to whom it has committed certain powers and duties, 
while neither of them is forthcoming, nor, if experience is any 
assurance on the point, likely to be. It may not, after all, be 
reasonable to charge the defect solely to the local authorities. 
Too much may be expected of them. The Act may ask for more 
than the human nature of local authorit’es possesses, and the 
result may consequently be due to a lack of a wise discrimination 
in the construction of the Act, more than to any other cause. It 
is in fact a political blunder which sacrifices efficiency to a 
political theory of local self-government—a theory applicable to 
many public functions, but strikingly inapplicable, from the very 
nature of the case, to this portion of the Public Health Adminis- 
tration. 
The conviction forces itself upon my intelligence that a more 
reasonable division of public health work must be drawn between 
the central and the local authorities in the immediate future of 
health legislation. | No doubt this would be more easily achieved 
were not the question of public expenditure so prominent a 
feature in such a re-arrangement ; but the State has already 
found its way to defray from the Public Treasury the expenses 
of public departments, such as education, because efficiency is 
reckoned of more account than local self-government. Other 
departments might be instanced on the same grounds ; but none 
of them, not even education, occupy the same important rank 
in the general weal as the conservation of the public health. If 
the sentiment, “ Sius populi suprema lex,” is to be more than a 
pretty euphony, then expenditure must be encountered in the 
exposition of health laws. The ills that infectious or communic- 
able diseases inflict upon our Australian communities are too. 
numerous and too far-reaching to allow for ever the cost of their 
suppression to be a barrier to entering upon the crusade to which 
scientific hygiene now invites us. 
The administration of infectious diseases comprises notification, 
isolation, disinfection, inspection, the establishment of baekerie= 
logical laboratories, and the control of vaccination and quarantine. 
Compulsory notification is already incorporated in the majority of 
our Public Health Acts. It has not been carried out. It is 
the starting point of a system, and where succeeding parts of the 
system are “studiously left alone it is seen that little good can 
arise from its its enforcement. This is only partially true. 
Whichever authority, however, holds in its hands the control of 
infectious disease, the same authority should carry notification 
into effect. 
Tsolation and disinfection must be regarded as the main working 
parts of the system. Isolation is adopted with the object of 
