When the time comes that only such persons as attend to all the details of cleanliness and prevention of the loss of property and health can be insured, the cost will be reduced 50%. Until we are willing, or educated up to that point, to protect our neighbors' lives and property as if they were ours, we must expect to pay this 50% more for everything we have, use, drink, eat, and wear. Longevity will be restricted in the same proportion. Hundreds of accidents would be prevented by proper care. Throwing foolishly the match, cigar, cigarette, etc., any and everywhere, causes great loss of property, and often life; the unthinking eat oranges and bananas in the street and cast underfoot the rinds and skins to cause the next moment the dislocation of a limb, or broken skull. Over 500 accidents have occurred in this city alone during the last 5 years, occasioned by some sort of vegetable or fruit refuse lying upon the pavements; fatal results, though not all immediate, happened to 15 persons, and a number were maimed for life. Broken bottles and glass thrown into the street and on the sidewalks bring about at times frightful accidents to both man and beast; and if a correct report could be had from each livery-man and teamster in this regard, it would startle the most inhuman of our race.
The tax-payer has a tendency to be selfish when he is really doing himself severe injury. It is a case of reflex action. In passing along a thoroughfare he sees a banana skin lying on the sidewalk. He cannot possibly stop or trouble himself to push it into the gutter. Almost immediately another man comes along, steps on the skin, slips, breaks his leg, and is carried to the hospital. He remains there a month, supported by the city, that is, by money paid by the same tax-payer. In this manner, and other ways, can every man act, both selfishly or unselfishly. If selfish in passing this by, it is sure to come back on him a hundred-fold to the original trouble required. His unselfishness will consist in saving his fellow-men from danger by removing the cause. Indeed, he will be selfish if he casts it off for the sake of decreasing his taxation, but such selfish unselfishness will be gladly excused.
Garbage thrown out of back doors or under neighbors' steps creates contagion, and in time the thoughtless individuals fall a prey to their own carelessness. Three out of every five men and five out of every hundred women are ruptured as a result of their own or somebody else's recklessness.
On the top of nearly every house in the section where artesian water is used, there is a tank to receive water for various purposes about each dwelling; much of this is employed for drinking and culinary uses. Without any attempt at a sensation, we pronounce this box or tank a death trap! There is not a clean one in this whole great city, that has an outside exposure, and 9 out of every 10 are reeking with filth. Having had occasion to investigate several I am convinced that they average alike. If so, there are at least 500 tons of concentrated filth playing the part of filters in the tanks of this city alone at this writing! And there is every reason to believe that this city is as clean as the average. Provided this is so, there is enough of such refuse in the United States to dam the Mississippi River many times and build a levee across Lake Erie.
Health officers may keep their own tanks clean in the future, but if individuals desire health and abolition of the need of Health Boards, let them keep their own tanks, back yards, streets, and pavements neat. Municipal corporations should prevent by law the throwing of any kind of rubbish into the streets, and make it a misdemeanor for the proprietors allowing any of their mercantile houses, work-shops, or residences to be found filthy, and there are thousands of them in this city. To avoid accidents, every man, woman, and child should be compelled to pass to their right on the street. Every person in every city not having a legitimate vocation in the eyes of the law, nor an income from property or money in the bank, should, if criminally inclined, be sent to the House of Correction. If poor and willing to work, they ought to be put to work in the public streets and in the parks, to beautify them, for the benefit of the frugal classes. No begging should be allowed, under penalty of imprisonment. That a city may escape being overrun by country tramps, their entrance should be quarantined.
To stop contagion, public crematories should be established and cremation of the human and animal bodies be compulsory. If the principal church and secret organizations will now change their rituals so as to permit of the incineration of the bodies of their deceased members, the world will have advanced 100 years before the close of this century and the average duration of life at that date will have increased from 34.8 to 40 years. It is needful that the false sentiment regarding the disposition of our dead should undergo a complete revolution. There could probably be no better aid to this end than a general investigation of the mortuary records of the towns and cities of the globe, by proper officials, the facts and discoveries of whom should be given all possible publicity. An hundred or so years ago this was not so much a matter of importance as now, with a greater and increasing density of population, by virtue of which a great portion of the habitable earth is fast becoming a mass of putrifying corruption, that will involve at no distant time the world in pestilence, woe, and desolation.
The recent official return on the condition of the London cemeteries is, or should be, sufficient to cause all reasonable persons to cry out for the crematory. In Brompton Cemetery, with an area of twenty-eight and three-fourths of an acre, there have been buried in less than fifty years one hundred and fifty-five thousand bodies. In Tower Hamlets Cemetery, with twelve acres less, in about the same time, the number is two hundred and forty-seven thousand.
When it is remembered how perfectly unfitted the soil of these districts is for burial purposes, together with the means so largely employed for preventing speedy decomposition, one may readily imagine the danger that menaces those above this still-increasing mass of sub-pollution.
Multiply the condition of the London suburbs by several hundred thousand more, and then ponder the product! Talk about sanitary regulations, when our public health laws are violated thus, and the air and water poisoned as a result of the superstitious custom of body burial! When pestilence stalks abroad, it is said to be planetary influence or divine wrath! The following from the Springfield Republican will indicate the current of public opinion:—
"That the custom of burying the dead is bound to be superseded by more scientific and economical methods, especially in the centers of population, may be seen in the reanimation of the old scheme of desiccation by New York capitalists. These men are not yet ready to accept cremation. Their project is to build mausoleums as substitutes for cemeteries, where the body will be subjected to the absorbent action of currents of pure, dry air, which will prevent decomposition, and, by thoroughly exhausting the body of moisture and gases, carry away all germs of disease. These air currents, thus laden, will then pass through furnaces, where all noxious elements will be destroyed. The lifeless form will be reduced in weight about two-thirds and nearly one-half in size. Resting in a sepulcher, it may then be preserved for an indefinite period. As explained in detail, with particulars of the beauty of the buildings thrown in, this scheme has advantages compared with the undesirable method in vogue, though it is less thorough and simple than cremation. A promoter of the enterprise in speaking of the desiccated body says that 'although shrunken, still, with the semblance of life, it is an object that the eye of affection can look upon without a shock, and the sanitarian can think of without a shudder.' In essence, however, the scheme is simply a concession to a public, not yet educated to the idea of cremation. While appropriating enough of the latter system to solve the question of public health, it caters to the human sentimentalities in preserving at half size the dead form. Upon these sentiments, summed up as the 'instinct of humanity,' the promoters of the new system base their hopes of profit. Besides advancing in its favor all the arguments used for cremation, its friends add that in the desiccating process no danger can exist of suspended animation escaping notice."