Report, New York State Department of
Health, 1909._

The whole difference of modern scientific research from that
of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense successes,
lies in its collective character, in the fact that every
fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of
relationships explained. In a sense, scientific research is
a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct
that makes men secretive.

_H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old._

Public or governmental hygiene has been chiefly concerned
with pure air and pure food, and with organisms producing
epidemic diseases. Boards of health are a recent invention,
and in this country they have as yet been only imperfectly
developed. They can never become the power they should be
until, first, public opinion better realizes their
usefulness and the fact that their cost to the taxpayer is
saved many times over by the prevention of death and
disease; second, more and better health legislation is
enacted--national, state, and municipal; and, third, special
training is secured for what is really a new profession,
that of a public health officer.

_Report on National Vitality._

CHAPTER VIII

LEGISLATIVE COMPULSION

Government is delegated to persons specially set apart for the
oversight of the people's welfare.

Personal conduct was free from such delegated power in the Anglo-Saxon
thought. The Englishman's house was his castle inviolate. This was
especially true of the early American settlers. Laws interfering with
personal liberty, a man's right to drink tea, to punish his own
children, to beat his own wife, to keep his own muck-heap, have been
deeply resented by the American citizen. Each step in the protection
of his neighbor has been taken only by a struggle extending the common
law of nuisance to a variety of conditions.

The protection of the man against himself, and of his wife and child
against his ignorance or greed, is one of the twentieth century tasks
yet hardly begun.

The control of man's environment for his own good as a function of
government is a comparatively new idea in republican democracy. The
cry of paternalism is quickly raised, on the one hand, of socialism,
on the other. Each gain has been at the cost of a hard-fought battle.
But it is certain that the individual must delegate more or less of
hi