ose of
garbage and drainage on his own property. Stables and privies must be
at least a hundred feet from water reservoirs. Factories may not
pollute streams that furnish drinking water. Merchants may be punished
if they put banana skins in milk cans, or if they fail to scald and
cleanse all milk receptacles before returning them to wholesalers.
Automobile drivers may be punished for disturbing sleep. Anything that
injures my health will be declared a nuisance and abolished, if I can
prove that my health is being injured and that I am doing all I can to
avoid that injury. No educational work will accomplish more for any
community than to make rich and poor alike conscious of nuisances that
are being committed against themselves and their neighbors. The rich
are able to run away from nuisances that they cannot have abated. If
proper publicity is given to living conditions among those who do not
resist nuisances, the presence of such conditions will itself become
offensive to the well-to-do, who will take steps to remove the
nuisance. Jacob Riis in this way made the slums a nuisance to rich
residents in New York City and stimulated tenement reform, building of
parks, etc.

_Anti-slum_ motives originated in cities where there is a clear
dividing line between the clean and the unclean, the infected and the
uninfected, the orderly and the disorderly, high and low vitality. As
soon as one district becomes definitely known as a source of nuisance,
infection, and disease, better situated districts begin to make laws to
protect themselves. A great part of our existing health codes and a
very large part of the funds spent on health administration are
designed to protect those of high income against disease incident to
those of low income, high vitality against low vitality, houses with
rooms to spare against houses that are overcrowded. To the small town
and the country the slum means generally the near-by city whose papers
talk of epidemic scarlet fever, diphtheria, or smallpox. Cities have
only recently begun to experience anti-slum aversion to country dairies
whose uncleanliness brings infected milk to city babies, or to filthy
factories and farms that pollute water reservoirs and cause typhoid.
The last serious smallpox epidemic in the East came from the South by
way of rural districts that failed to notify the Pennsylvania state
board of health of the outbreak until the disease was scattered
broadcast. Every individual know