Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/453

Rh of millions of dollars in value. It is beginning to be understood that, from the monetary standpoint alone, the value of a productive male life to the state is even greater than its value to the family dependent upon that life. The state makes a financial investment in every life, and every day the amount of that investment is increased, and every day the value of each human life should be greater than ever before. In other words, it costs the state a number of hundred dollars (in Massachusetts about $500), to educate alone, and rear to the normal producing age each human life, and when a life is lost much more is lost in addition to the sum invested and the compound interest thereon. That life can never be replaced. Its power to produce is gone forever, and no one can take its place. All others living and to be born have their own work to do, must bear their proportional part of the state's burden.

The causes contributing to impair the quality or shorten the period of productiveness in the individual may be classed as preventable and unpreventable. Those included in the latter class are storms, floods and other forces of nature, unforeseen accidents, the few unpreventable diseases, and like fortuitous conditions. Among the preventable causes of unproductiveness we find insanity, crime, preventable diseases (contagious and otherwise), unsanitary factories and schools, bad sewerage, poor water supply, and the like.

The efficiency of a life becomes impaired and is a potential social burden through disease. Disease is a deviation from the normal, and is now understood to mean more than mere physical disability, for individual and national productiveness is found to be impaired through the manifestation of disease in three forms: First, poor physical health, largely the result of preventable diseases; second, poor mental health, insanity for example, the cure for which lies in the direction of its prevention; third, poor moral health, as illustrated in the various forms of what is called crime, most of which can be prevented.

We have seen that the causes contributing to a greater or less impairment of individual usefulness are of fundamental importance, and universal in their distribution, and any remedy which is to be successfully and economically applied must be likewise basic in character, and of sufficient scope to meet the conditions present.

It becomes incumbent upon us then to strive to raise the standard, physical, mental and moral, of each voter, thus expediting the task of showing him the importance of the relation between the activities of the state and those of the individual.

For generations we have waited, and are still asked to wait, for our school children to develop and rise to carry these burdens; to improve politics; to enact more righteous laws; to secure to the people a more uniform and beneficent government; and we forget the while that when