For instance, the Commissioner of Health in Albany (Dr. 
Eugene Porter) in his report for 1907 tells us that in New York 
state alone, 2,000 people die annually from typhoid out of 20,000 
who are attacked by this filth disease. “Allowing,” he says, “each 
life to be worth $3,000, a low estimate—as the young and vigor¬ 
ous are most often victims — and estimating that 15,000 of the 
20,000 cases were men and were kept from labor 40 days, and 
putting the value of a day’s work at $1.50, the total pecuniary 
loss to the state amounts to $7,000,000.” 
Let us look at ourselves as we really are. Let us stop brag¬ 
ging of our wonderful progress! for in matters of public sanita¬ 
tion we are a whole generation behind Germany and England. 
Japan is many centuries more civilized than we, and yet we send 
to her cleanly people dozens of meddlesome missionaries who are 
sadly needed at home if only to teach us the rudiments of public 
health; or if missionaries must go abroad then, in the name of 
decency, let them invade Russia, where priests still fight disease 
with bell and book rather than with soap and scrubbing brush. 
The wonder of our modern age is that with a host of doctors 
in every city, epidemics burst forth under their very noses and we 
search in vain for record of medical foresight in preventing these 
costly calamities. 
The larger our rivers, the greater the sewers we make of 
them, spreading the pest from one town to another. Our lakes 
and our harbors we make cesspools. The result? Let us inquire 
into the penalty we pay—starting with New York, digressing into 
New England, sweeping westward to the great Mississippi valley 
and the Far West, and returning to the southland, observing how 
the various parts of the country compare in this signing of whole¬ 
sale death warrants. 
Only a few weeks ago my neighboring city of Kingston-on- 
the-Hudson burst forth with a first-class epidemic—a filth disease. 
This time it was smallpox. This epidemic cost the city thousands 
of dollars in medical fees, to say nothing of the loss through panic 
among those who ordinarily went there for shopping. Even little 
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