as paved streets and a plentiful supply
of water for public baths and private homes were essential to the
display of Rome's luxury. Generally speaking, residence streets are
cleaned in small towns just as waterworks are introduced, to gratify
the display motive of those who have lawns to water and clothes to
show.

Instinct strengthens the display motive. As every one can be interested
in instinct hygiene, so every one is capable of this display motive to
the extent that his position is affected by other people's opinion. It
was love of display quite as much as love of beauty that gave Greece
the goddess Hygeia, the worship of whom expressed secondarily a desire
for universal health, and primarily a love of the beautiful among those
who had leisure to enjoy it.

_Commerce_ brooks no preventable interference with profits, whether by
disease, death, impassable streets, or disabled men. The age of
chivalry was also the age of indescribable filth, plague, Black Death,
and spotted fever that cost the lives of millions. It would be
impossible in the civilized world to duplicate the combination of
luxury and filthy, disease-breeding conditions in the midst of which
Queen Bess and her courtiers held their revels. The first protest was
made, not by the church, not by sanitarians, but by the great merchants
who were unable to insure against loss and ruin from the plagues that
thrived on filth and overcrowding. By an interesting coincidence the
first systematic street cleaning and the first systematic ship
cleaning--maritime quarantine--date from the same year, 1348 A.D.; the
former in the foremost German trading town, Cologne, and the latter in
Venice, the foremost trading town of Italy. The merchants of
Philadelphia and New York started the first boards of health in the
United States. For what purpose? To prevent business losses from yellow
fever. Desire for passable streets, drains, waterworks, and strong
boards of health has generally started with merchants. For commercial
reasons many of our states vote more money for the protection of cattle
than for the protection of human life, and the United States votes
millions for the study of hog cholera, chicken pip, and animal
tuberculosis, while neglecting communicable diseases of men. No class
in a community will respond more quickly to an appeal for the rigid
enforcement of health laws than the merchant class; none will oppose so
bitterly as that which makes profits out of the