Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The First Fundamental — Health public health is the foundation on which reposes the happiness of the people and the power of a country," said Lord Beaconsfield forty years ago. The statement made then is still true. In the course of the next twelve months a million and a half persons will die in the United States; more than four million two hundred thousand will be constantly sick, which is to say that over five million homes, containing twenty-five million persons, will be affected and made wretched sometime during the year as a result of morbidity and mortality. The cost of such wholesale sickness and death amounts to millions of dollars annually. Individually the American takes more baths than the average man of any other nation, but looked at from a communal point of view he is nearly as dirty as the people of what are usually referred to as the less enlightened lands. In Spain the death rate per million of population inthe period from 1905 to 1908, from the most typical of the filth diseases, typhoid, was 362; in the United States it was 288, while in Ireland it was 91, in England 80, in Prussia 61, and in Switzerland 46. In the American community this condition of affairs may be traced to the want of cooperation on the part of citizens and the indifference of public officials, due largely to their lack of imagination and understanding of the meaning of sanitation. As a people we fail to appreciate the importance of health and the effect which it has upon the growth and progress of the community. There are a number of weighty problems involved in the growth of every town which are closely associated with its health and the extent of the death rate. They may be enumerated as those dealing with the removal of garbage and ashes, the care of sewage, the sourc...