REMEDIAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS 185 



waste of money, under the present system." The 

 municipal farms would serve a double purpose, it 

 must be remembered, not only providing pure and 

 safe milk for the institutions where milk is largely 

 used for dietetic purposes, but setting up a standard 

 which private enterprise would be compelled to emu- 

 late. It is not difficult to see that a city producing 

 milk having' an exceedingly low bacterial content 

 would be able to enforce the observance of a bacterio- 

 logical standard otherwise impossible of realization. 

 Even if such a farm did not pay, — though there 

 is no honest reason why it should not if properly 

 managed, — the influence for good which it exerted 

 upon the private dairies would probably equal, in 

 any fairly large city, what could be accomplished by 

 several inspectors, 



rv 



That there should be established in every American 

 city having a population of 25,000 or over municipal 

 depots for the supply of milk intended especially for 

 infant consumption is, I believe, one of the most 

 vitally important lessons which we have to learn from 

 the many experiments that have been tried in this 

 country and in Europe. That the infantile death- 

 rate can be very materially reduced by such means is 

 unquestionable; and that is only another way of 

 saying that our cities to-day are directly responsible 



