206 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



clean, raw, modified milk for infants it is necessary to 

 know something of the city and the steps by which 

 the system has been developed. Rochester is a city 

 of nearly 200,000 inhabitants. There is something 

 of the freedom and progressiveiless of the West about 

 it, shot through with the conservatism of New Eng- 

 land. With about five thousand births per annum 

 there must be at all times nearly twenty thousand 

 children under five years of age in the city. Its 

 daily milk supply is drawn from something like seven 

 hundred farms, all lying within a radius of fifty or sixty 

 miles. It is distributed by two hundred and twenty- 

 five retailers, each of whom is licensed and pays an 

 annual fee of $2. Its milk problem is, therefore, 

 radically different from that of our greatest cities, 

 like New York or Chicago, and is much more typical 

 of the average American city. 



They have no legally established bacteriological 

 standard for milk in Rochester. It is part of the 

 Rochester creed that a high bacteriological standard, 

 say of 500,000 per cubic centimeter, is a good deal 

 less desirable than none at all. If they had a city 

 ordinance forbidding the sale of milk containing 

 more than 100,000 bacteria per cubic centimeter, 

 it is probable that they could not successfully en- 

 force it, and the result would be general demorali- 

 zation. But they have in Rochester a very active 

 and progressive Milk Commission, established in 1900 



