Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/657

 SANITATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 637

and thus filth became the medium of " dispensations of provi- dence."

But, however welcome these evidences of divine wrath may have been to the zealot, they entailed unsufferable losses upon those classes of society which, in the breaking up of feudal institutions, stepped into the dominant position. I refer to the mercantile interests. By a strange coincidence, the first quarantine and the first street-cleaning in Germany date from the same year, 1348; the former in the foremost maritime city, Venice, the latter in the dominant guild town, Cologne. Thus at the same time began the reaction against the prevailing theory of the providential origin of plagues and the everlasting filth of the mediaeval city. A well-defined philosophy soon arose to justify protection to commerce and garments and health. Erasmus voiced this new doctrine when he attributed the Sweating Sickness (1485, 1518) to the uncleanly habits of the English and the defective ventilation of their houses. More's Utopia had modern sanitary regulations, including isolation hos- pitals for transmissable diseases. Quarantine regulations in the Mediterranean preceded More, and by Montesquieu's time "Most countries in Europe have made exceedingly good quar- antine regulations" a policy then being introduced by the new American commercial states.

The fourth period is that of nuisance sanitation, the evolu- tion by the courts of a nuisance law. This could not precede commercial sanitation, for so long as heaven sent disease, objec- tion to noisome sights and odors was based on simple aesthetic motives. When earthly causes were premised, then the latitude of the courts could be greatly extended. Furthermore, it must be remembered that the same social diffentiation which caused the filth theory of disease likewise strengthened the aesthetic and pecuniary motives to cleanliness. " Nuisance" presumes social strata. So long as every householder owns a goat, a pig- pen and slop barrel, a stable and a muddy, foul door-yard, there will be no calls upon the courts to declare this capital a public nuisance. When Bracton, therefore, in the fourteenth century, talks of nuisances, he generally means protruding roofs