Page:James Hudson Maurer - The Far East (1912).pdf/25

 American Industrial plants kill every year a trifle over 25,006 persons, and injure 125,000 more.

American building operations cost 3,000 lives every year, and 10,000 other persons sustained injuries.

Automobile accidents of last year took 229 lives, without estimating the thousands more or less seriously injured.

At a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments, held in Chicago, April 1, 1908, reports were submitted showing that 455,000 infants died in the United States during the previous year from the effects of food poisons. J. M. Hurty, Secretary of the Indiana State Board of Health, produced figures to show that 65 per cent. of the deaths of infants in America last year were due to poisons administered in impure foods and the deadly concoctions placed on the market by fraudulent food manufacturers.

Great numbers of adult deaths each year are recorded by heart failure or acute indigestion, and these deaths to a considerable extent can also be placed at the door of poisonous food adulterants.

Dr. Thomas Darlington, president of the New York Board of Health, says that among wage workers 30 per eent. of the deaths are due to the dreaded disease, tuberculosis; that the money loss has been estimated in the United States alone at $330,000,000 annually.

During the past eight years 71,000 people sought relief from this horrible system of capitalism by suicide.

The frantic struggle for existence is also responsible for most of the 1,000 murders which the United States averaged annually during the past dozen years.

Insanity has doubled in the last 13 years. Every one of the 330 mad houses in America is clamoring for more room; on an average of 50,000 insane are admitted into these institutions annually, to say nothing of those admitted into almshouses or private sanitariums.

Enforced idleness, and the exploitation of the toilers when employed, even in its narrow sense, is responsible for many deaths. Thousands die because the necessary medical aid cannot be purchased.

Millions are underfed, poorly housed, underclad, and having no security in the means of life, fail an easy victim to the ravages of diseases that mankind is subject to.

But why continue this horrible story of privation, suffering and murder?

The question of far more importance is, who or what