Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/661

 SANITATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 641

local authorities of the independent action [or indifference] which was the glory of our Anglo-Saxon institutions, and like rickety children place them in the go-cart of central govern- ment." In the meantime private philanthropy had led the way and had constructed hospitals, model tenements, schools, and had educated the masses, who now demanded as rights what was originally proposed as charity. For fifty years England has acted upon the double principle that the boulevard owes to the alley protection against disease and unsanitary conditions, and that it is the right of both to demand protection against each other and themselves. But both principles are based upon the theory that there is an unearned increment upon which soci- ety has claims, that there is an unpaid increment which is due the so-called poor, and that sanitary administration offers a very direct and most efficacious means of reducing the inequality.

Socialistic sanitation is therefore necessarily constructive. The term is used instead of "democratic sanitation," because the former suggests activity, endeavor, construction, application of public funds to remedy social wrongs or deficiencies ; while the latter might mean no more than common indifference. We know it in America as the power that condemns rookeries ; restricts builders ; regulates hours of labor and the age of labor- ers ; builds hospitals, public baths and lodging-houses; sets aside great areas for parks and playgrounds ; establishes sanatoria for consumptives ; inspects factories and mines ; defines dangerous trades, and prescribes territorial limits to those that pollute stream or air; compels vaccination; certifies physicians, den- tists, druggists, barbers ; quarantines the sick on land and sea separating mother and child, or condemning property, if need be; rejects immigrants; enters lodging-houses, even dwellings, to determine their sanitary condition ; prohibits the adulteration of foods and penalizes the sale, or offer for sale, of impure foods for man and beast ; presumes to name certain fuel as unfit ; spends millions for water-works, sewage farms, and the support of health departments. No one community has carried out a consistent and thorough program, but no community has failed to accept the principle that the public has the right and the duty