Page:The humanizing of commerce and industry, the Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered in Adelaide, 9th May, 1919.pdf/19

 attendance on the workers during their sickness, nor the provision of drugs and special comforts. If then we could remove sickness from our midst, the good health resulting would automatically increase our production by over twelve and a half million founds a year. Even if it cost that sum, the expenditure would be justified to alleviate the human suffering involved.

In devising a practical policy to secure better health we shall have to rely largely upon the advice of our health authorities throughout Australia. It has been already recognized in other countries, particularly Great Britain, that a true health policy calls for a much greater effort on the preventive side than upon the healing side, and it is interesting to note that in Great Britain the members of the British Medical Society have vied with each other in making valuable suggestions as to the means by which the health of the people can be preserved. It is suggested that the future education of medical men should provide for about fifty per cent, of the training being devoted to means of preventing disease, the other fifty per cent, to the healing of disease.

With health guaranteed by the community, I suggest that the next essential to happiness is a system of proper education. Without it the citizen cannot enjoy the beauties of our world and of creation and mankind; his usefulness to the community is limited, and one more is added to the discontented, unhappy, inefficient section.

I am not competent to express any view on the practical alterations that should be made in our system; I can only speak from experience of the failure of our present methods to fit young men and women properly to start the business of life. Most of them find on commencing a business career that they have to begin to re-educate themselves. I have been particularly struck, too, with the fact that our .educational system does not teach national ideals. I believe that if we are to succeed in the reconstruction of our part of the world, it is essential we should have clear national ideals as the goal towards which we as a people are seeking to travel. Ask any man or woman in Australia to-day what are our national ideals, and you cannot get an answer. As far as I know we have only one, "A White Australia." What are the other things that we as a people are striving to achieve? They do not exist in any concrete form that can be taught to children, and that can thereafter through life be used as a guide by them.