Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/451

Rh social progress, and for the attainment of which he is largely to be held accountable.

It is the duty of the state, on the other hand, to furnish as the second factor the best possible environment for the cultivation of those attributes, which will secure to him, his neighbor and posterity the largest measure of 'life, liberty and happiness.'

Obviously, then, the best interests of both the state and the individual are mutual, and the benefits derived by each from the faithful performance of duty are reciprocal. The individual and the state can not be divorced.

Every human life, however, is not an asset. All lives at some period are not only non-productive, but are the source of considerable expense to the state or relatives and friends, and each unproductive life becomes a proportional burden upon all productive society.

The chief cause of unproductiveness in the adult is inefficiency, and the chief cause of inefficiency having been found by competent investigators to be disease, we must feel that health and disease have too long been considered from the narrow standpoint of an individual blessing or calamity. As our commercial and intellectual activities increase, our socio-medical problems have been multiplied until it has become imperative that we view them in their economic aspects and deal with them accordingly.

To the ultra-conservative or the uninformed it may appear that the elevation of preventive medicine, in its largest and most comprehensive sense, to the importance of a great economic issue, is a step unpractical if not unnecessary.

If, however, under the conditions which now prevail, we add to the cost of human suffering, mental and physical, the financial cost of disease to the individual and to the state in the maintenance of hospitals, asylums, jails, permanent and periodic quarantine regulations with their accompanying commercial disturbance, and then subtract from this total the cost of those diseases which, in the present light of science, are known to be preventable, provided adequate prophylactic measures can be enforced, we shall readily discover in the remainder the warrant for presenting this subject in the dignity of one of national economic consequence.

If adequate relief is to be rendered, it is necessary that ultimate, not proximate, causes and remedies be sought. We shall, therefore, undertake to view in a full yet not extravagant light the terms and factors with which we must deal.

Few people realize the value and importance of a human life. If its value were better understood, a very different conception would prevail regarding the necessity of certain measures, which thoughtful and far-seeing persons are endeavoring to call to popular attention.