cause one has a right to
clean streets, regardless of the distant neighbor's welfare or
interest. When the right to health is granted health laws are made, and
all men within the jurisdiction of the lawmaking power own health
machinery that provides for the administration of those laws. A system
of public baths takes the place of a bathhouse supported by charity; a
law restricting the construction and management of all tenements takes
the place of a block of model tenements, financed by some wealthy man;
medical examination of all school children takes the place of a private
dispensary; a probation law takes the place of the friendly visitor to
the county jail.

Most of the rights we call inalienable are political rights no longer
questioned by anybody and no longer thought of in connection with our
everyday acts, pleasures, and necessities. When our political rights
were formulated in maxims, living was relatively simple. There was no
factory problem, no transportation problem, no exploitation of women
and children in industry. Our ancestors firmly believed that if the
strong could be prevented from interfering with the political rights of
the weak, all would have an equal chance. The reason that our political
maxims mean less to-day than two hundred years ago is that nobody is
challenging our right to move from place to place if we can afford it,
to trial by jury if charged with crime, to speak or print the truth
about men or governments. If, however, anybody should interfere with
our freedom in this respect, it would be of tremendous help that
everybody we know would resent such interference and would point to
maxims handed down by our ancestors and incorporated in our national
and state constitutions as formal expressions of unanimous public
opinion.

The time is past when any one seriously believes that political freedom
or personal liberty will be universal, just because everybody has a
right to talk, to move from place to place, to print stories in the
newspapers. The relation of man to man to-day requires that we
formulate rules of action that prevent one man's taking from another
those rights, economic and industrial, that are as essential to
twentieth-century happiness as were political rights to
eighteenth-century happiness. Political maxims showed how, through
common desire and common action, steps could be taken by the individual
and by the whole of society for the protection of all. Health rights,
likew