Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/369

Rh enterprise has failed to furnish anything like adequate accommodation for agricultural laborers, and owing to heartless indifference, indolence or official obstruction—perhaps in some degree also to their own complicated ambiguities—acts of parliament, such as the housing of the working classes act of 1890, have remained practically in abeyance. The result of all this is that lamentable abuses—which perhaps the amending act of 1900 may in some degree remedy—still abound on every hand, and that our scattered hamlets, instead of being idyllic abodes of peace, purity and health, have become hot-beds of discontent, dirt and disease.

But in spite of all this, the country, measured by every standard, remains more salubrious than the town, and, as it is certain to participate in those sanitary improvements which in the progress of medical science and of governmental activity in such matters must come, still further to lower the town death-rate and raise its vital energy, it will probably always maintain its position ahead of the town in salubrity. 'The life of the great city,' said Mr. Henry George, 'is not the natural life of man.' He has an affinity for the open fields, and just as the mortality of city adults must always exceed that of rural adults, on account of the more dangerous nature of town occupations, so must the health of a town population, as a whole, be inferior to that of a country population, because of the more unfavorable nature of its topography. The grouping and close proximity of houses interfere with ingress of sunlight and movement of air, and facilitate the spread of zymotic diseases, which often leave permanent debility and defects behind them. The close agglomeration of numbers of human beings, especially in a state of indigence, is conducive to uncleanliness, and to the generation and diffusion of poisonous exhalations of many kinds. And the larger the grouping, and the closer the proximity and the denser the agglomeration, the greater do the risks become, so that in the interests of humanity there should be some limit to town extension and stringent regulation of town organization. Industry says men must aggregate, sanitary science says they should be permitted to do so only so far as is not incompatible with the welfare of the race, and under well-understood safeguards.

We have been contrasting the merits of town and country from a health point of view, and the conclusion must be that while the country is entitled to the preference of the sanitarian, both are urgently in need of his attentions. Excellent and fruitful work has already been done in both, but much remains to be done, and, as I have already said, the most clamant want of the moment is, it appears to me, the application of remedies to relieve the pressure caused by the increase of population in urban centers.

You are acquainted with the remedies which have been proposed