Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/533

Rh available to us immense opportunities for the betterment of man's estate. For example, to mention only one of the lines along which improvement is plainly practicable, what is to hinder an indefinite mitigation, if not a definite extinction, of the ravages of such dread diseases as consumption and typhoid fever? Or what, we may ask, is to hinder the application to New York, Philadelphia and Chicago of as effective health regulations as those now applied to Havana? Nothing, apparently, except vested interests and general apathy. We read, not many years ago, that a city of about one million inhabitants had, during one year, more than six thousand cases of typhoid fever. The cost to the city of a single case may be estimated as not less, on the average, than one thousand dollars, making an aggregate cost to that city, for one year, of more than six millions of dollars. Such a waste of financial resources ought to appeal to vested interests and general apathy even though they cannot be moved by any higher motives. Thanks to the penetration of the enlightenment of our times, distinct advances have already been made in the line of effective domestic and public sanitation; but the good work accomplished is infinitesimal in comparison with that which can be, and ought to be, done. It is along this and along allied lines of social and industrial economy, that we should look, I think, for the alleviation of the miseries of mankind. No amount of contemplation of the beatitudes, human or divine, will prevent men from drinking contaminated water or milk; and no fear of future punishments, which may be in the meantime atoned for, will much deter men from wasting their substance in riotous living. The moral certainty of speedy and inexorable earthly annihilation is alone adequate to bring man into conformity with the cosmic rules and regulations of the drama of life.

And finally we must reckon amongst the most important of the conditions favorable to the progress of science, the unexampled activity in our times of the scientific spirit as manifested in the work of all kinds of organizations, from the semi-religious Chautauquan assemblies up to those technical societies whose programs are Greek to all the world beside. Literature, linguistics, history, economics, law and theology are now permeated by the scientific spirit if not animated by the scientific method. Curiously enough, also, the terminology, the figures of speech and the points of view of science are now quite common in realms of thought hitherto held somewhat scornfully above the plane of materialistic phenomena. Tyndall's Belfast address, which, twenty-seven years ago, was generally anathematized, is now quoted with approval by some of the successors of those who bitterly denounced him and all his kind. Thus the mere lapse of time is working great changes and smoothing out grave differences of opinion in favor of the progress