o protect the well-to-do, the comfortable, and the
clean against the slum. It is true to-day that if you study your city
and stick a pin in the map, street for street, where infection is known
to exist, you will find the number steadily increase as you go from
uncongested to congested streets and houses, from districts of high
rent to districts of low rent. Because it is easier to learn the number
of persons who have measles and diphtheria and smallpox than it is to
learn the incomes and living conditions prejudicial to health, and
because our laws grant protection against communicable diseases to a
child in whatever district he may be born, the record of cases of
communicable diseases has heretofore been the best test of health
rights unenforced. Even in country schools it would make a good lesson
in hygiene and civics to have the children keep a record of absences on
account of transmissible disease, and then follow up the record with a
search for conditions that gave the disease a good chance.

But to wait for contagion before taking action has been found an
expensive way of learning where health protection is needed. Even when
infected persons and physicians are prompt in reporting the presence of
disease it is often found that conditions that produced the disease
have been overlooked and neglected.

For example, smallpox comes very rarely to our cities to-day. Wherever
boards of health are not worried by "children's diseases," as is often
the case, and wait for some more fearful disease such as smallpox,
there you will find that garbage in the streets, accumulated filth,
surface sewers, congested houses, badly ventilated, unsanitary school
buildings and churches are furnishing a soil to breed an epidemic in a
surprisingly short time. Where, on the other hand, boards of health
regard every communicable disease as a menace to health rights, you
will find that health officials take certain steps in a certain order
to remove the soil in which preventable diseases grow. These steps,
worked out by the sanitarians of Europe and America after a century of
experiment, are seen to be very simple and are applicable by the
average layman and average physician to the simplest village or rural
community. How many of these steps are taken by your city? by your
county? by your state?

1. Notification of danger when it is first recognized.

2. Registration at a central office of facts as to each dangerous
thing or person.