pronounced. The steps worked out by the anti-slum motive to protect "those who have" from disease arising from "those who have not" are given on page 31.

Pro-slum motives are not exactly born of anti-slum motives, but, thanks to the instinctive kindness of the human heart, follow promptly after the dangers of the

slum have been described. You and I work together to protect ourselves against neglect, nuisance, and disease. In a district by which we must pass and with which we must deal, one of us or a neighbor or friend will turn our attention from our danger to the suffering of those against whom we wish to protect ourselves. Charles Dickens so described Oliver Twist and David Copperfield that Great Britain organized societies and secured legislation to improve the almshouse, school, and working and living conditions. When health reports, newspapers, and charitable societies

make us see that the slum menaces our health and our happiness, we become interested in the slum for its own sake. We then start children's aid societies, consumer's leagues, sanitary and prison associations, child-labor committees, and "efficient government" clubs.

Rights motives are the last to be evolved in individuals or communities. The well-to-do protect their instinct, their comfort, their commerce, but run away from the slums and build in the secluded spots or on the well-policed and wellcleaned avenues and boulevards. Uptown is often satisfied with putting health officials to work to protect it against downtown. Pro-slum motives are shared by too few and are expressed too irregularly to help all of those who suffer from crowded tenements, impure milk, unclean streets, inadequate schooling. So long as those who suffer have no other protection than the self-interest or the benevolence of those better situated, disease and hardship inevitably persist. Health administration is incomplete until its blessings are given to men, women, and children as rights that can be enforced through courts, as can the right to free speech, the freedom of the press, and trial by jury. There is all the difference in the world between having one's street clean because it is a danger to some distant neighbor, or because that neighbor takes some philanthropic interest in its residents, and because one has a right to clean streets, regardless of the distant neighbor's welfare or interest. When the right to health is granted health laws are made, and all men within the jurisdiction of the lawmaking power own health machinery that provides for the administration of those laws. A system of public baths takes the place of a bathhouse supported by charity; a law restricting the construction and management of all tenements takes the place of a block of model tenements, financed by some wealthy man; medical examination of all school children takes the place of a private dispensary;

a probation law takes the place of the friendly visitor to the county jail.

Most of the rights we call inalienable are political rights no longer questioned by anybody and no longer thought of in connection with our everyday acts, pleasures, and necessities. When our political rights were formulated in maxims, living was relatively simple. There was no factory problem, no transportation problem, no exploitation of women and children in industry. Our ancestors firmly believed that if the strong could be prevented from interfering with the political rights of the weak, all would have an equal chance. The reason that our political maxims mean less to-day than two hundred years ago is that nobody is challenging our right to move from place to place if we can afford it, to trial by jury if charged with crime, to speak or print the truth about men or governments. If, however, anybody should interfere with our freedom in this respect, it would be of tremendous help that everybody we know would resent such interference and would point to maxims handed down by our ancestors and incorporated in our national and state constitutions as formal expressions of unanimous public opinion.

The time is past when any one seriously believes that political freedom or personal liberty will be universal, just because everybody has a right to talk, to move from place to place, to print stories in the newspapers. The relation of man to man to-day requires that we formulate rules of action that prevent one man's taking from another those rights, economic and industrial, that are as essential to twentieth-century happiness as were political rights to eighteenth-century happiness. Political maxims showed how, through common desire and common action, steps could be taken by the individual and by the whole of society for the protection of all. Health rights, likewise, 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,

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. 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 only by studying both the people who are to be protected and the conditions in which these people live. A street, a cellar, a milk shop, a sick baby, or an adult consumptive tells more honestly the story of health rights enforced and health rights unenforced than either sanitary code or sanitary squad. Not until we turn our attention from definition and official to things done and dangers remaining can we learn the health progress and health needs of any city or state.

The health code of one city looks very much like the health code of every other city. This is natural because those who write health codes generally copy other codes. Even small cities are given complicated sanitary legislative powers by state legislatures. Therefore those who judge a community's health rights by its health laws will get as erroneous an impression as those who judge hygiene instruction in our public schools from printed statements about the frequency and character of such instruction. Advocates of health codes have thought the battle won when boards of health were given almost unlimited power to abate nuisances and told how to exercise those powers.

1 A striking demonstration of law enforcement that followed lawmaking is given in The Real Triumph of Japan, L. L. Seaman, M.D.