OUR DUTY IN RELATION TO HEALTH.

CHAPTER I.

THE HOUSE.

A DISTINGUISHED general officer, who ruled his family with something akin to military discipline, never failed to severely reprove his children when he saw them endanger their health by any childish imprudence. He would say to them, "Remember that I love you most when you are well. When you are ill you become a trouble and an expense. It is your duty, therefore, to try to keep yourselves well. Knowing your duty, do it."

Although, happily, we have been trained to extend sympathy and help to the sick and afflicted, it is nevertheless true that the sick and afflicted are a trouble and an expense. We ought all to remember this. We ought all of us to try our utmost to keep well. It is our moral duty not to tax the patience, sympathy, or pockets of loving friends and relatives if we can possibly avoid doing so. Health is the greatest of all blessings. The sound mind, in the sound body, is the chief thing to be desired. Intellectual and moral superiority follow in the wake of bodily health. Health and happiness are ever linked together, and seldom exist excepting when thus linked.

The health of a nation or community depends upon the health of the units which compose it. General moral and intellectual progress depends upon the moral and

intellectual progress of individuals. Since "National Health" (both moral and intellectual) depends on the health of individuals; patriotism, affection, and the sense of self-preservation ought equally to prompt the individual to try to keep well.

The health of the individual is mainly, though not entirely, in his own keeping. If every individual did his duty in relation to health, our health would ultimately be entirely in our own keeping; and we should no longer run the risks, through inheritance and infection, which we run at present. If the individual lose his health it may cause loss of health to others. The watching, anxiety and fatigue which sickness entails upon loving friends and relatives has undermined many a constitution. Infectious disease may infect those we love best, and in some instances may be transmitted to generations yet unborn.

No arguments are needed, therefore, to show that the first and highest duty of every individual is to keep himself healthy. If he succeed in doing this, he will be in a fair way to perform his duty to his neighbour and himself. health be lost it is difficult to perform either of these duties adequately.

If

In these days the individual is in some danger of forgetting that his first duty is to keep himself well and to take care that he is not the cause of disease in others. The carelessness and apathy of individuals has necessitated the formation of "Boards" and "Sanitary Authorities ;" and we are too ready to give over our individual responsibility to the keeping of a board and to allow "rates" to take the place of morals. Sometimes it would almost seem as if the individual thought that he had some moral right to be kept healthy rather than to try to keep himself healthy. It is difficult, for instance, to see what right a man has to think that he is at liberty to be absolutely filthy in his house and habits, and to call upon someone else to cleanse his augean stable, and to have such cleansing done at the expense of a rate which too often falls more heavily on his neighbours than himself.

Such is the condition of things which exists in big cities. Individuals, for the sake of profit, crowd houses together, so that the possibility of anything like cleanly life is impossible. And when the filthiness which we have watched growing under our very eyes, and which we have made no effort to stop, reaches a pitch in which the danger is too obvious to be neglected, we expend vast sums to be rid of the nuisance; and, too often, in the act of getting rid of one we create a second which is only less dangerous than the first.

It is, it will be admitted, clear enough that if builders of houses and owners of property had been made to do their duty in the past, the disgraceful overcrowding which exists in some of our big cities would never have occurred; and the troubles which we are encountering in connection with sewage, water supply, and the dwellings of the poor, would never have arisen. Through avarice or ignorance, owners and builders have failed to do their duty spontaneously, and no compulsion has been put upon them. The more crowded the "Building Estate," the greater the profit to owner and lessee. It has been an easy and profitable thing to build houses side by side and almost back to back, and with no curtilage whatever, each house stuck over a sewer like a sort of sewer gasometer. Tenants have thought such houses cheap, and have failed to reckon loss of health, rates, and doctor's bills among the annual costs which dwellings such as these entail.

Although we recognise the evils which have arisen from our negligence in the past, we make no serious attempt to stop the formation of such evils. The past generation left us a legacy of overcrowding with which we are still grappling unsuccessfully, and we shall leave a still worse legacy to posterity. It might have been thought that railway and telegraphic communication would have diminished overcrowding, by making it more easy to go and communicate from point to point; but, as a matter of fact, the reverse has been the case, and railways have merely served to swell the size of places already overgrown.

The great difficulty of dealing with overcrowding is this,

that so many people make a profit out of it. Among these

are:

I. Owners of property, whose ground rents are proportioned to the crowding.

2. Speculative builders, who find it more profitable to build a terrace of fifty houses than fifty detached houses.

3. All the tradesmen who supply builders with materials. 4. Water Companies, whose profits depend upon having a large number of customers in a small area.

5. Gas Companies, for similar reasons.

6. Railway Companies, to whom the advantages of big centres of population are obvious.

7. Tradesmen generally, because their profits are necessarily proportioned to the closeness of population.

Thus overcrowding is a source of apparent profit to almost every section of the Community; and until we get "Boards" composed entirely of men who have minds which rise superior to all considerations of immediate profit, there is but little chance of the owner and builder being made to do their duty.

When a district has become overcrowded so that healthy filth disposal is impossible, then comes the gigantic sewerage scheme, which only increases the overcrowding, by making it possible to pack houses together even closer than before, and we usually finish off in a worse plight than we were in at the commencement.

A simple Act, applicable to the whole kingdom, making it imperative on builders to provide a sufficient curtilage to every house and to provide for filth disposal, would stop the formation of those insanitary conditions, which, being formed, we seem powerless to correct. Prevention is better than cure.

In big centres of population, where water-supply, lighting, and filth disposal have passed to the control of a central authority, the responsibility of the individual is at a minimum. If, therefore, he is compelled to live in an overcrowded city, the most he can do is to keep his house as clean and wholesome as circumstances and the plumber

will permit; to obey the bye-laws which the central authority may seem fit to enact for his benefit; and to do his duty as a citizen by returning the most honest and least self-interested men to represent him on the "Board."

There are many rural and semi-rural places which seem inclined to imitate the great centres, and in which the controlling authorities are more ready to push expensive sanitary works than to seek to compel individuals to do their duty. I shall try to show in the present volume that if individuals, in rural and semi-rural places, would recognise their moral responsibility in relation to health, great schemes of sewerage and the like, which are never an unmixed good but often an unmixed evil, would never become necessary; and their construction should never be permitted merely to serve the interests and profit of companies or individuals.

By those who are content to live simply, the conditions of healthy living are easily attained.

A cottage (ornée, if you like) built on a slight eminence or on the slope of a hill, well exposed to the sun, and with a quarter of an acre of land, is no utopian idea. The idea is capable, be it observed, of contraction or expansion, but if the individual is to be quite independent of others for his healthy surrounding, a small plot of garden ground is absolutely essential.

The foundations of this modest house must be solid and dry, the walls thick, the windows big, and the roof watertight.

There must be neither cesspools nor sewer, which are great and acknowledged causes of sickness. No filth or refuse must be allowed to accumulate, but it must be returned every day to the soil.

The rain water which falls upon the roof should be kept for washing and cooking, if not for drinking; and I may remark, parenthetically, that there is no reason why rainwater should not be collected in an ornamental vessel as well as in the dirty-looking water-butt, or hideous tank which is now too much in vogue. It is far better to have an ornamental water vessel in a prominent place where it