ppoints health officers.

4. The council, board of aldermen, legislature, or congress that
enacts health laws.

5. The police courts and the judiciary--police, circuit and
supreme--that decide whether society has suffered from violation
of law and what penalties should be inflicted for such violation.

Legislative bodies have hitherto slighted their responsibilities toward
public health. The chairman of a committee on public health of a state
legislature was heard to remark, "I asked for that committee because
there isn't a blooming thing to do." If voters, nonvoters, and health
officials will follow the suggestion of this book to secure school and
health reports that will disclose community and health needs, it will
be increasingly difficult for legislators to refuse funds necessary to
efficient health administration.

To the courts tradition has required such deference that one hesitates
to find out in how far they have been responsible in the past for the
nonenforcement of health laws. Yet nothing is more obstructive of
sanitary progress than the failure of magistrates to enforce adequate
penalties for truancy, adulteration of milk, maintaining a public
nuisance, defiling the air with black smoke, offering putrid meats for
sale, running an unclean lodging house, defying tenement-house or
factory regulations, working children under age and overtime, spitting
in public places, or failing to register transmissible diseases.[16]

The appointing officer cannot, of course, be held responsible unless
voters and nonvoters know in how far his appointees are inefficient,
and in how far he himself has failed to do his utmost to secure funds
necessary to efficiency. Too frequently appointments to health
positions have been made on political grounds, and catastrophes have
been met by blundering incapacity. The political appointee has been
made the scapegoat, and the appointing officer, whether mayor,
governor, or president, has regained public confidence by replacing an
old with a new incompetent.

In order to have health machinery work properly, the appointing officer
should not be allowed to shift responsibility for failure to his
subordinates. For example, it was recently found in New York City that
while the tenement-house commissioner was being condemned for failing
to enforce the law, he had turned over to the corporation counsel, also
appointed by the mayor, for prosecution ten thousand "violations" to
whi