Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/655

 SANITATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 635

preting religious history when he said: "A natural law is as sacred as a moral principle." He might have said of this early period of sanitation, " Natural law is a potential moral principle," for then, as now, the unhealthful became the offensive, then the antisocial, finally the immoral. For example, we are at present tending to develop moral standards with reference to expectora- tion in public places, as we have succeeded in establishing the immorality of drunkenness.

The second stage is that of the introduction of sanitary appliances for the health and comfort of the tribute-taking classes. Carthage has her paved streets. Greece worships Hygeia and idolizes her devotees. Rome has paved streets, public sewers, extensive water-works, gem-bedecked public baths, and furnishes water more freely than any city of modern times, while the superintendency of water-works is allotted only to senators and honored officials. In the twelfth century Paris paves her streets, for the same reason that four centuries later London introduces water to serve wealth and power. In Rome, Paris, London, as in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, these first steps are due to another motive than desire to protect either public or private health. These public works, so far as they are due to other than property considerations, are primarily evidences of advancing standards of comfort, or perhaps concessions to a growing aesthetic sensitiveness. Constructed by the few to gratify their taste for cleanliness, ease, or show, the benefits accrue to society without reference to social standing, except that the poor may be permitted only a partial exploitation. In Rome we find the leisure-class motives isolated. To the patrician reveling in the possession of oriental loot, a place was necessary where he might parade the evidences of his prowess. The promenade must not remain unpassable after every shower, wherefore street- paving. The streets were cleaned because dirt and splendor, filthy passages and sweeping gold-braided togas, were incom- patible. Compared with the perfumes of the East and the sweetness of costly olive oil, the exhalations from the human body were obnoxious ; hence frequent appearance in the public bath became indispensable to social standing. Rome was