business it is to attend to such things, then it matters not how
erroneous or even directly mischievous may be the specific measures
taken: the net result at first is sure to be an improvement. Not until
attention has been effectually substituted for neglect as the general
rule, will the statistics begin to show the merits of the particular
methods of attention adopted. And as we are far from having arrived
at this stage, being as to health legislation only at the beginning of
things, we have practically no evidence yet as to the value of methods.
Simple and obvious as this is, nobody seems as yet to discount the
effect of substituting attention for neglect in drawing conclusions from
health statistics. Everything is put to the credit of the particular
method employed, although it may quite possibly be raising the death
rate by five per thousand whilst the attention incidental to it is
reducing the death rate fifteen per thousand. The net gain of ten per
thousand is credited to the method, and made the excuse for enforcing
more of it.

STEALING CREDIT FROM CIVILIZATION

There is yet another way in which specifics which have no merits at
all, either direct or incidental, may be brought into high repute by
statistics. For a century past civilization has been cleaning away
the conditions which favor bacterial fevers. Typhus, once rife, has
vanished: plague and cholera have been stopped at our frontiers by a
sanitary blockade. We still have epidemics of smallpox and typhoid; and
diphtheria and scarlet fever are endemic in the slums. Measles, which in
my childhood was not regarded as a dangerous disease, has now become
so mortal that notices are posted publicly urging parents to take it
seriously. But even in these cases the contrast between the death and
recovery rates in the rich districts and in the poor ones has led to
the general conviction among experts that bacterial diseases are
preventable; and they already are to a large extent prevented. The
dangers of infection and the way to avoid it are better understood
than they used to be. It is barely twenty years since people exposed
themselves recklessly to the infection of consumption and pneumonia
in the belief that these diseases were not "catching." Nowadays the
troubles of consumptive patients are greatly increased by the growing
disposition to treat them as lepers. No doubt there is a good deal of
ignorant exaggeration and cowardly refusal to face a human an