Civics and Health | Page 9

board of health of the outbreak
until the disease was scattered broadcast. Every individual knows of
some family or some district that is immediately pictured when terms
like "disease," "epidemic," "slum," are pronounced. The steps worked
out by the anti-slum motive to protect "those who have" from disease
arising from "those who have not" are given on page 31.
[Illustration: A COUNTRY MENACE TO CITY HEALTH]
Pro-slum motives are not exactly born of anti-slum motives, but, thanks
to the instinctive kindness of the human heart, follow promptly after the
dangers of the slum have been described. You and I work together to
protect ourselves against neglect, nuisance, and disease. In a district by
which we must pass and with which we must deal, one of us or a
neighbor or friend will turn our attention from our danger to the
suffering of those against whom we wish to protect ourselves. Charles
Dickens so described Oliver Twist and David Copperfield that Great
Britain organized societies and secured legislation to improve the
almshouse, school, and working and living conditions. When health
reports, newspapers, and charitable societies make us see that the slum
menaces our health and our happiness, we become interested in the
slum for its own sake. We then start children's aid societies, consumer's
leagues, sanitary and prison associations, child-labor committees, and
"efficient government" clubs.
Rights motives are the last to be evolved in individuals or communities.
The well-to-do protect their instinct, their comfort, their commerce, but

run away from the slums and build in the secluded spots or on the
well-policed and well-cleaned avenues and boulevards. Uptown is often
satisfied with putting health officials to work to protect it against
downtown. Pro-slum motives are shared by too few and are expressed
too irregularly to help all of those who suffer from crowded tenements,
impure milk, unclean streets, inadequate schooling. So long as those
who suffer have no other protection than the self-interest or the
benevolence of those better situated, disease and hardship inevitably
persist. Health administration is incomplete until its blessings are given
to men, women, and children as rights that can be enforced through
courts, as can the right to free speech, the freedom of the press, and trial
by jury. There is all the difference in the world between having one's
street clean because it is a danger to some distant neighbor, or because
that neighbor takes some philanthropic interest in its residents, and
because one has a right to clean streets, regardless of the distant
neighbor's welfare or interest. When the right to health is granted health
laws are made, and all men within the jurisdiction of the lawmaking
power own health machinery that provides for the administration of
those laws. A system of public baths takes the place of a bathhouse
supported by charity; a law restricting the construction and
management of all tenements takes the place of a block of model
tenements, financed by some wealthy man; medical examination of all
school children takes the place of a private dispensary; a probation law
takes the place of the friendly visitor to the county jail.
Most of the rights we call inalienable are political rights no longer
questioned by anybody and no longer thought of in connection with our
everyday acts, pleasures, and necessities. When our political rights
were formulated in maxims, living was relatively simple. There was no
factory problem, no transportation problem, no exploitation of women
and children in industry. Our ancestors firmly believed that if the strong
could be prevented from interfering with the political rights of the weak,
all would have an equal chance. The reason that our political maxims
mean less to-day than two hundred years ago is that nobody is
challenging our right to move from place to place if we can afford it, to
trial by jury if charged with crime, to speak or print the truth about men
or governments. If, however, anybody should interfere with our

freedom in this respect, it would be of tremendous help that everybody
we know would resent such interference and would point to maxims
handed down by our ancestors and incorporated in our national and
state constitutions as formal expressions of unanimous public opinion.
The time is past when any one seriously believes that political freedom
or personal liberty will be universal, just because everybody has a right
to talk, to move from place to place, to print stories in the newspapers.
The relation of man to man to-day requires that we formulate rules of
action that prevent one man's taking from another those rights,
economic and industrial, that are as essential to twentieth-century
happiness as were political rights to eighteenth-century happiness.
Political maxims showed how, through common desire and common
action, steps could be taken by the individual and by the whole of