ise, are to be obtained through common action. A modern city must
know who is accountable when an automobile runs over a pedestrian, when
a train load of passengers lose their lives because of an engineer's
carelessness, when an employee is incapacitated for work by an accident
for which he is not responsible, or when fever epidemics threaten life
and liberty without check. How can a child who is prevented by
removable physical defects from breathing through his nose be
enthusiastic over free speech? Of what use is freedom of the press to
those who find reading harder than factory toil? How futile the right
to trial by jury if removable physical defects make children unable to
do what the law expects! Who would not exchange rights of petition for
ability to earn a living? Children permanently incapacitated to share
the law's benefits cannot appreciate the privilege of pursuing
happiness.

Succeeding chapters will enumerate a number of health rights and will
show through what means we can work together to guarantee that we shall
not injure the health of our neighbor and that our neighbor shall not
injure our health. The truest index to economic status and to standards
of living is health environment. The best criterion of opportunity for
industrial and political efficiency is the conditions affecting health.
The seven catchwords that describe seven motives to health legislation
and health administration, seven ways of approaching health needs, and
seven reasons for meeting them, should be found helpful in analyzing
the problem confronting the individual leader. Generally speaking, we
cannot watch political rights grow, but health rights are evolved
before our eyes all the time. If we wish, we can see in our own city or
township the steps taken, one by one, that have slowly led to granting
a large number of health rights to every American.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Prepared by Dr. John S. Fulton, secretary of the state board of
health, Maryland, and quoted by Dr. George C. Whipple in _Typhoid
Fever_.

[2] Marshall O. Leighton, quoted in Whipple's _Typhoid Fever_.

CHAPTER III

WHAT HEALTH RIGHTS ARE NOT ENFORCED IN YOUR COMMUNITY?

Laws define rights. Men enforce them. For definitions we go to books.
For record of enforcement we go to acts and to conditions.[3] What
health rights a community pretends to enforce will, as a rule, be found
in its health code. What health rights are actually enforced can be
learned on