388 THE MEANS OF PREVENTION. 



all be paid, and hold office until sixty years of age, or during activity. 

 Those members who are required to devote their whole time to the 

 service of the State should be pensioned on retirement. The State 

 can never afford to be a " bummer." Men who can afford to work 

 for honor alone are seldom fitted to serve the State well. This 

 principle of working for the State for honor alone, so common in 

 certain positions in this country, can not be too strongly condemned. 

 It is death to young men, and equally detrimental to the public 

 good. A State which is too poor to pay competent men for the 

 work it requires of them is too poor to exist. It had better secede 

 out of this Union, or be merged into another which is capable of 

 paying for work well done. 



Boards of health are too much limited to gathering statistics. 

 Again, these statistics are often too much limited to those of the so- 

 called infectious diseases. The latter class of statistics has a very 

 subordinate value. It matters but little whether one thousand or 

 ten thousand men perish from a given infectious disease, so long as 

 the cause is present, yet unknown, and prevention thus far impos- 

 sible. It is far more necessary that observations and experiments 

 in these two directions be made than that exact statistics be gathered 

 annually. Statistics as to causal influences, however, can never be 

 too highly appreciated. These accumulated statistics have one good 

 purpose : without them, in this country, it would be impossible to get 

 means enough from the Legislatures to carry on the necessary studies 

 and experiments by which we may in the end hope to find means 

 of prevention. Boards of health should always have the necessary 

 means to carry on an experiment station, and to amply reward 

 specialists for experimental researches in any desired direction. 



There is, however, another form of statistics, the careful collec- 

 tion of which would send a thrill of horror over the human family, 

 and it is from this form that we may, in the distant future, expect 

 very valuable results. To obtain them we need far better practi- 

 tioners, much less prejudiced thinkers, than we at present have in 

 the medical profession. 



I allude to statistics with regard to the really preventable dis- 

 eases of life ; the diseases due to ignorance, not only on the part of 

 the diseased, but of practitioners as well. An ignorance of duty 

 with reference to the latter, for the medical adviser who treats only 

 is simply fit for confinement among idiots. I allude further to the 

 diseases due to the ignorance of the people in the employment of 

 quacks, and further to the still more to be condemned American 

 craze, the use of those disgraces of our civilization, legalized patent 



