The Foundations of Culture 
217 
protection of the child in this country. There is at the present 
time a bill pending in the National Congress, creating a Depart- 
ment of Public Health, the Owen Bill, which has the support of 
the leaders of medical, philanthropic and social progress. It 
should be passed at once. As an illustration of the practical 
import of such legislation, it may be mentioned that our present 
pension roll of over $150,000,000 per annum is three-fourths of 
it due to illness and death from diseases that were preventable. 
We are building the Panama Canal under the direction of our 
War Department economically and well because we first con- 
trolled the sanitation of the Isthmus. All are agreed that without 
such sanitary control the task would be as impossible for us as it 
was for DeLesseps. 
The hope of the future conservation of our national vitality 
lies in the presence in every community of centers of liberal learn- 
ing and research like this college and this Scientific Association, 
where the scientific foundations of future success in this great 
movement are laid, and intelligently trained exponents of these 
principles are scattered throughout the community to give practi- 
cal demonstration of the true course of right living. 
But this movement for the conservation of national vitality 
is not something which we can leave to government, philanthropic, 
educational and other public agencies. Each one of us has his 
part to play, a part which is vital to our present and future national 
life. 
The greatest single factor which is now operative to lower vital 
efficiency in such a cultured community as this is the artificial 
strain of high pressure living, which is now all but universal in 
all urban communities. This pressure arises, not as in former 
times from the struggle for bread, for mere subsistence, among the 
very poor. On the contrary, its most acute form is seen among 
the rich and the well-to-do. The struggle for wealth, for recogni- 
tion and for social position has replaced with us the struggle for 
existence. This strain is felt not only by the men of big business 
and large professional responsibilities, but also by their wives and 
daughters, whom we are apt to think of as coddled in the lap of 
luxury. Our very play has come to be a most exhausting kind of 
work. 
There are few cultured families in America where the blighting 
influence of business, professional or social excess is not evident. 
