from transmissible diseases may be removed by
force to hospitals. What is more to the point, rural hospitals have
proved that patients cared for by them are far more apt to recover than
patients cared for much more expensively and less satisfactorily at
home, while less likely to pollute water and milk sources or otherwise
to endanger health.

With national machinery the chapter on Vital Statistics has already
dealt. We shall undoubtedly soon have a national board of health. Like
the state boards, its first function should be educative. In addition,
however, there are certain administrative functions where inefficiency
may result in serious losses to nation, state, and locality. National
quarantine, national inspection of meats, foods, and drugs are
administrative functions of vital consequence to every citizen.
Authorities are acquainted at the present time with the fact that the
sanitary administration of the army and navy is unnecessarily and
without excuse wasteful of human energy and human life. In the Spanish
American War 14 soldiers died of disease for 1 killed in battle; in the
Civil War 2 died of disease to 1 killed in battle; during the wars of
the last 200 years 4 have died of disease for 1 killed in battle. Yet
Japan in her war with Russia, by using means known to the United States
Army in 1860, gave health precedence over everything else and lost but
1 man to disease for 4 killed in battle. Diseases are still permitted
to make havoc with American commerce because the national government
does not apply to its own limits the standards which it has
successfully applied to Cuba and Panama.

"The Japanese invented nothing and had no peculiar knowledge or skill;
they merely took occidental science and used it. The remarkable thing
is not what they did, but that they were allowed to do it. It is a
terrible thing that Congress should choose to make one of its rare
displays of economy in a matter where a few thousand dollars saved
means, in case our army should have anything to do, not only the
utterly needless and useless loss of thousands of lives, but an
enormous decrease of military efficiency, and might, conceivably, make
all the difference between victory and defeat."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The technic and principles of municipal engineering have been
treated in detail in _Principles of Sanitary Science and the Public
Health_, by William T. Sedgwick, and in _Municipal Sanitation in the
United States_, by Char