SANITARY EDUCATION IS SLOW 85 



barbarous. But humanity will put up with many 

 barbarous things. This is due to ignorance of their 

 nature. Before the teachings of Edward Jenner had 

 borne fruit, small-pox raged a very large percentage 

 of the population of Great Britain were pock-marked ; 

 yet there was no public outcry. People were used to 

 it, and did not know what it was to be without small- 

 pox in their midst. This was ignorance of public 

 health. But now that small-pox has been banished, 

 a case of small-pox in the community causes fear the 

 fear of a loathsome affection. And in a few years 

 the presence of a case of fly-borne disease will, without 

 doubt, produce a similar feeling. 



The progress of civilisation seems to drift on un- 

 consciously. For years after Jenner's discovery indi- 

 viduals strove and worked to enforce vaccination 

 against small-pox ; but it required the lapse of nearly 

 a century before small-pox became a thing of the past 

 in England, where the discovery was made. Even now 

 there is occasionally a movement of infidelity against 

 one of Nature's most beneficent arrangements. The 

 discovery of the cause and the mode of transmission 

 of malaria brought in its train a means of preventing 

 one of the most devastating diseases of the tropics ; but 

 even now, fifteen years later, some intelligent Govern- 

 ments hesitate to apply the knowledge gained 

 mosquito-reduction is not universal even in malaria- 

 stricken India or in insect-pested Egypt. Knowledge 

 arrives slowly, scientific progress is tardy, humanity 

 lingers long in the slough of doubt. The public will 

 jump to its feet and will act quickly when there is a 

 massacre of Armenians, or an ill-treatment of Congo 

 or Putomayo natives ; but if there is a preventable 

 child-mortality in its midst, it will ponder carefully 



