deaths. In the Boer War it caused nearly six thousand
deaths as compared with seven thousand five hundred from wounds in
battle, while other diseases caused five thousand more. In the majority
of modern campaigns, from two-thirds to five-sixths of all deaths are
due to disease and not to battle. It may be that we sanitarians will
achieve the ends of the peace congresses by an unexpected route, and
make war a healthful and comparatively harmless form of national
gymnastics. Its battle-mortality rate, for the number engaged, is not so
very far above football now!

Given the bacillus, how does it get into the human system? Here the
evidence is so abundant and overwhelming that we may content ourselves
with bald statements of fact. The three great routes of this pestilence
are water, milk, and flies. Of the three, the first is far the most
common and important. While only a rough statement is possible, probably
eighty-five per cent of all cases from water, five per cent from milk,
five per cent through flies, and five per cent through other channels,
would fairly represent the percentage.

That it is conveyed through water is as certain as that the sun rises
and sets. The only embarrassment in proving it lies in selecting from
the swarm of instances. There is the classic case of the Swiss villages
on opposite sides of the same mountain chain, the second of which drew
its water-supply from a spring that came through the mountain from a
brooklet running by the first village. Typhoid fever broke out in the
first village, and twenty days later it appeared in the second village,
twenty miles away on the other side of the mountain. Colored particles
thrown into the brook on one side promptly appeared in the spring upon
the other. Then there was the gruesome modern instance of Plymouth,
Pennsylvania, in 1885. A single case of imported typhoid occurring on
the watershed of a reservoir was followed, thirty days later, by an
epidemic of eleven hundred cases in a population of eight thousand.

An equally vivid instance came under my own observation. A school and a
penitentiary drew their water-supply from the same power-flume, carrying
a superb volume of purest water from a mountain stream. Early in the
autumn a single case of typhoid appeared in a small town near the head
of the flume. The discharges were thrown into the swiftly running water.
Two weeks later an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the school, and
three weeks later in