e on he refused to
be looked upon as the _deus ex machina_ of the town. He decided that
the best way to give English lessons to foreigners was to improve the
school. His beneficence in supplying them with pure water at the mill
did not prevent a ravaging typhoid epidemic because the town water was
not watched. He saw that the best way to improve health was to
strengthen the health board and to make his co-workers realize that
they were citizens responsible for their own privileges and rights.

Emergency hospitals and Y.M.C.A. buildings are sad substitutes for
safety devices and automatic couplers. Christmas shopping in November
is less kind than prevention of overwork in December. Night school and
gymnastic classes are a poor penance for child labor and for work
unsuited to the body. The left hand cannot dole favors enough to offset
the evils of underpay, of unsanitary conditions, of inefficient
enforcement of health laws tolerated by the right hand.

Just because a man is taking wages for work done, is no reason why he
should forfeit his rights as a citizen, or allow his children, sisters,
neighbors, to work in conditions which decrease their efficiency and
earning power. What the employee can do for himself as a citizen,
having equal health rights with employers, he has never been taught to
see. Factory legislation is state direction of industries so far as
relates to the safety, health, and moral condition of the people,--and
which embraces to-day, more than in any other epoch, the opinion of the
workers themselves. No government, however strong, can hope
successfully to introduce social legislation largely affecting personal
interests until public opinion has been educated to the belief that the
remedies proposed are really necessary. Until schools insist upon a
better ventilation than the worst factories, how can we expect to find
children of working age sensitive to impure air? Where work benches are
more comfortable than school desks, where drinking water is cleaner and
towels more sanitary, however unsanitary they may be, than those found
in the schoolhouse, the worker does not realize that they menace his
right to earn a living wage as much as does a temporary shut-down.

Employers are by no means solely to blame for unhealthy working
conditions. A shortsighted employee is as anxious to work overtime for
double pay as a shortsighted employer is to have him. Among those who
are agitating for an eight-hour day