i go THE KINGDOM OF MAN 



history and nature of the disease-germ or infective 

 matter ; (2) the infected subject, his repellant or tolerant 

 possibilities, and his predisposition or receptivity ; (3) the 

 intermediary or carrying agents. Whilst it is true that 

 little or nothing has been done by the State in acquiring 

 or making use of knowledge as to the first and second of 

 these factors, with a view to controlling the spread of 

 disease, it is the fact that much has been done both in the 

 way of investigation and administration in relation to 

 the third factor. The great public-health enquiries and 

 consequent legislation in this country, in which scientific 

 men of the highest qualifications, such as Simon, Farr, 

 Chadwick, and Parkes, took part during the Victorian 

 period, have had excellent results ; to them are due 

 the vast expenditure at the present day on pure water, 

 sewage disposal, and sanitary inspection. But little or 

 nothing has been done in regard to the first and second 

 divisions of the subject, in which the less organised 

 portions of the British Empire are more deeply con- 

 cerned than in waterworks and sewer-pipes. It is still 

 contested whether leprosy (which is a serious scourge 

 in the British Empire, though expelled from our own 

 islands) is a matter of predisposition caused by diet or 

 solely due to contagion ; and yet it is left to individual 

 practitioners to work out the problem. The State prepares 

 vaccine lymph in a cheap and unsatisfactory way for the 

 use of its, till recently, compulsorily vaccinated citizens ; 

 but the State, though thus interfering in the matter of 

 vaccine, has spent no money to study effectively and so to 

 improve the system of vaccination. Here and there some 

 temporary and ineffective enquiry has been subsidised by 

 a Government office ; but there is no great army of in- 

 vestigators working in the best possible laboratories, led 

 by the ablest minds of the day, with the constant object 



