ssen the cost of sickness. It is estimated that if illness
in the United States could be reduced one third, nearly
$500,000,000 would be saved annually.

5. To decrease the amounts spent on criminality that can be traced
to overcrowded, unwholesome, and unhygienic environment.

In addition to the economic gain, the establishment of a national
department of health would gradually but surely diminish much of
the misery and suffering that cannot be measured by statistics.
Sickness is a radiating center of anxiety; and often death in the
prime of life closes the gates of happiness on more than one life.
Let us not forget that the "bitter cry of the children" still goes
up to heaven, and that civilization must hear, until at last it
heeds, the imprecations of forever wasted years of millions of
lives.

If progress is to be real and lasting, it must provide whatever
bulwarks it can against death, sickness, misery, and ignorance;
and in an organization such as a national department of health,
adequately equipped,--a vast preventive machine working
ceaselessly,--an attempt at least would be made to stanch those
prodigal wastes of an old yet wastrel world.

Among the branches of the work proposed for the national bureau are the
following: infant hygiene; health education in schools; sanitation;
pure food; registration of physicians and surgeons; registration of
drugs, druggists, and drug manufacturers; registration of institutions
of public and private relief, correction, detention and residence;
organic diseases; quarantine; immigration; labor conditions;
disseminating health information; research libraries and equipment;
statistical clearing house for information.

Given such a national center for health facts or vital statistics,
there will be a continuing pressure upon state, county, and city health
officers, upon physicians, hospitals, schools, and industries to report
promptly facts of birth, sickness, and death to national and state
centers able and eager to interpret the meaning of these facts in such
simple language, and with such convincing illustrations, that the
reading public will demand the prompt correction of preventable evils.

Our tardiness in establishing a national board of health that shall do
this great educational work is due in part to the fact that American
sanitarians have frequently chosen to _do things_ when they should have
chosen to _get things done_. Alm