Public playgrounds for children in cities have an influence that it is as good for health as it is for morals, providing, as it does, fresh air and active exercise for children. Open air schools for tubercular children are being operated in several cities with excellent results in health and school work.
Many states are making an organized effort to fight tuberculosis by establishing fresh-air colonies where, with pure air, rest and plenty of the most nourishing food, patients are restored to health.
Care of epileptics and the insane by the state, with proper hygiene and treatment, accomplishes many cures.
The nation is doing excellent work in a few lines, notably the Pure Food Bureau and the Marine Hospital Corps, but perfected organization of all the forces is lacking. The Department of Agriculture has done a wonderful work in investigating and curbing insect pests that injure farm crops and trees, and in stamping out disease among live stock. Forty-six million dollars have been spent and well spent in the work in the last few years, but it is a matter of reproach that more pains are taken to save the lives of cattle and farm crops than human lives.
There should be a strong central Bureau of Health with power and money scientifically to investigate disease, to distribute information as the Department of Agriculture does to farmers, and to carry out their ideas, as do state and city boards of health.
We have dealt with only one side of the question—the suffering and sorrow; but in a work on conservation, we must consider also the money question, the loss to the nation in time and money of these great wastes of health and life.
There are no trustworthy statistics as to wages. The average yearly earnings of all persons, from day laborers to presidents, is estimated at seven hundred dollars; but as not more than three-fourths of the people are actual workers, three-fourths of this amount, or five hundred and twenty-five dollars is taken as the average wage.
From these figures the money value of a person under five years is given at ninety-five dollars; from five to ten years, at nine hundred and fifty dollars; from ten to twenty years at $2,000; from twenty to thirty at $4,000; thirty to fifty years at $4,000; fifty to eighty at $2,900 and over eighty at $700 or less. The average value of life at all ages is $2,900 and the 93,000,000 persons living in this country would be worth in earning power the vast sum of $270,000,000,000. This is probably a low estimate but is more than double all our other wealth combined.
Now let us see how much of this vital wealth is wasted. As the average death rate is at least eighteen out of each thousand, we have 1,500,000 as the number of deaths in the United States each year. Of these, forty-two per cent., or 630,000 are classed as preventable—so that a number equal to the entire population of the city of Boston die each year whose deaths are as unnecessary as is the waste of our forests by fire.
If some great plague should carry off all the people of Boston, not the people of the United States only, but of the whole world would be roused by the appalling calamity and every possible means would be employed to prevent other cities from sharing such a fate; but because these preventable deaths are not in one city, but are widely scattered, we have long remained indifferent to this terrible and needless waste.