tatistics, for instance, showing a moderate apparent rate of
_increase_ of a disease within the last thirty years are looked upon by
statisticians as really indicating that it is at a standstill. It is
almost certain that at least from ten to twenty per cent more of the
cases actually occurring will be recognized during life and reported
after death than was possible with our more limited knowledge and less
effective methods of registration thirty years ago. So we need not
hesitate to encourage ourselves to renewed effort by the reflection that
we are enlisted in a winning campaign, one in which the battle-line is
already making steady and even rapid progress, and which can have only
one termination so long as we retain our courage and our common-sense.

This decline of the tuberculosis death-rate is, of course, only a part
of the general improvement of physique which is taking place under
civilization. If we could only get out from under the influence of the
"good old times" obsession and open our eyes to see what is going on
about us! There is nothing mysterious about it. The soundest of physical
grounds for improving health can be seen on every hand. We point with
horror, and rightly, to the slum tenement house, but forget that it is a
more sanitary human habitation than even the houses of the nobility in
the Elizabethan age. We become almost hysterical over the prospect that
the very fibre of the race is to be rotted by the adulteration of our
food-supply, by oleomargarine in the butter, by boric acid in our canned
meats, by glucose in our sugar, and aniline dyes in our candies, but
forget that all these things represent extravagant luxuries unheard of
upon the tables of any but the nobility until within the past two
hundred, and in some cases, one hundred, years. Up to three hundred
years ago even the most highly civilized countries of Europe were
subject to periodic attacks of famine; our armies and navies were swept
and decimated with scurvy, from bad and rotten food-supplies; almost
every winter saw epidemics breaking out from the use of half-putrid
salted and cured foods; only forty years ago, a careful investigation of
one of our most conservative sociologists led him to the conclusion
that in Great Britain _thirty per cent of the population never in all
their lives had quite as much as they could eat_, and for five months
out of the year were never comfortably warm. The invention of steam,
with its swift and c