Page:The humanizing of commerce and industry, the Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered in Adelaide, 9th May, 1919.pdf/18

 happiness. All men and their wives and children are entitled to be kept healthy. The greatest asset any nation has is the health of its people, and if the money-grubbers still fear costs, investigation will prove to them that no matter how high the expenditure on the preservation of the nation's health, it will still be profitable.

To appreciate this it is only necessary to examine the results obtained in our vast armies during the war. The most highly skilled and gifted doctors and specialists were called to the nation's service to devise means of preventing disease among the soldiers. The results were amazing. The same skill, supplemented by the efforts of thousands of warm-hearted nurses, has been devoted to making well the sick and the injured. In pre-war times could the humblest citizen in the community rely on receiving such gladly given and sympathetic attention? Certainly not. But in post-war times each of us will have to admit his direct interest in the health of every other member of the community, and gladly give support to some form of communal service under which the highest and the lowest of our citizens tiny babes or aged men or women will all receive the best medical, surgical, or nursing skill to heal them not as a charity or for money, but as a right gladly acknowledged and a service anxiously rendered in the common name of humanity.

We have got to realize quickly that our personal obligation as members of a community each to the other is to see that all have the basic conditions essential to human happiness. Delay will bring disaster in the aftermath of the war, but with the acceptance of this view comes the duty of putting it into practice and making the Gospel of Happiness real. Health the base of material happiness, will have to be handled in new, far-reaching ways. Until then we shall never cease to shudder at our past neglect, with its untold suffering and misery.

I can hear some one say: "That is an amiable ideal, but is it practicable?" The answer is that it is not only practicable, but it is actually going to be profitable. I see from the published figures of the experience of members of friendly societies that each member averages ten days' sickness a year. If this experience is applied to the industrial army of Australia, excluding dependents, it enables us to calculate that in a year the loss to the community, at ten shillings a day, from sickness of workers, amounts to twelve and: a half million pounds. This does not take into account the necessary