Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/361

Rh whole of the unfitness of the race is attributable to the lack of food. Many other causes contribute to that. A little later Dr. William Hall seemed himself to realize this, for he affirmed that poverty—a very comprehensive term, covering a multitude of evils—is ultimately responsible for the unsatisfactory physique of our people. Luxury has its degenerates as well as poverty, but poverty is the wholesale degenerator, and it is, therefore, I am sure, with immense satisfaction that all we who are interested in the public health have heard that it is the intention of the government to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into the working of the poor law. It is to be hoped that the deliberations of that commission will lead not only to the adaptation of the poor law to modern social conditions, but to the discovery of efficient methods of dealing with what may be called incipient pauperism, or pauperism in the making, of distinguishing between professional paupers and the widely different classes that are from time to time in need of relief owing to fluctuating economic conditions, sickness, immaturity, or senile decay, and of ensuring that there shall no longer be death or disease due to actual starvation amongst us. If the commission can solve the problems thus indicated, and if at the same time our statesmen can in their wisdom, by free trade, or retaliation, or tariff reform, or colonial preference, or in any other way, secure steady employment to all who are willing to work, we may then feel sure that the golden age will not be long delayed.

But we can not sit with hands folded waiting for the golden age to be conferred by any government or commission. We must strenuously persevere in our endeavors to ameliorate the condition of the people, and this we can best do by improving their environment in the widest sense. It is with environment you are officially concerned, and sure I am that you have already by your up-hill labors in mending it left your stamp on the condition of the people. And, indeed, I am inclined to think if there had been no sanitary science and no sanitary inspectors, the environment in this country would by this time have been pretty nearly empty in certain localities. The right hand of the medical officers of health, and with special functions of your own, you have in a multiplicity of ways promoted that cleanliness which is not inferior to godliness in giving a man length of days in the land. You have sweetened our lives by curbing the offensive cupidity of tradesmen and manufacturers. You have protected us from secret poisoning in our food, on a scale that the Borgia never dreamt of. You have, at no small risk to yourselves, warded off from us contagious, infectious and epidemic diseases, and extinguished sparks of them, which but for you might have become ruinous conflagrations. You have even in certain cases provided us with mortuaries and superintended our burial.

Your duties as sanitary inspectors bring you into intimate contact