Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/651

 SANITATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS.

A NOTED economist complains that in current discussions of social progress " our eyes are turned, not upon hopes and possi- bilities and positives, but rather upon despair, impossibilities, and negatives." Effectual progress depends upon positive ideas, and would we have our social theories pregnant for good, we must find for them a basis in positive ideas. It is, therefore, important that the social reformer and philosopher turn his eyes to the field of sanitation, where neither the specialist, the philoso- pher, nor the public has forsaken hopes, denied possibilities, nor abandoned positives. Of the achievements in this field the historian Lecky, writing his Map of Life at the very close of the nineteenth century, was able to state : " The triumphs of sani- tary reform are perhaps the brightest page in the history of our century." Smallpox has been stamped out of every land where fanaticism or criminal neglect has not stayed the rescuing hand, plague has been put under control, typhoid abolished, diphtheria mastered, consumption explained and controlled, yellow fever driven even from the tropics. Whereas the savage dies at the rate of 60 to 100 in every 1,000, and suffers ravaging epidemics which periodically threaten the very existence of whole races, backward nations, such as Spain and Italy, lose but 30, while city rates in Germany and the United States are reduced to less than 20 in 1,000. The average age has advanced fifteen years in two generations. But not only has life's tenure lengthened, but life has been made more worth the living. Sickness has decreased, air is purer, water cleaner, large classes of men have for the first time known the pleasures of health.

Not all is done, however. Squalor and filth and destitution still abound, and preventable diseases still number their victims by hundreds of thousands. Some cities are backward, some states are skeptical, some classes are obdurate ; but what man has done man can do, and we know experimentally that the future may confidently be expected to see the total eradication

631