As a contrast with the Massachusetts code let me refer to the sanitary laws, or want of them, in the State of Illinois. According to a copy of the public health laws issued for the information of local health authorities and others of this State, there occurs, for instance, but two sections covering the establishing of sewers. Rules and regulations are in evidence for isolating, quarantining, disinfecting and coping with various infectious diseases after they come into existence, but not a statutory provision is to be found establishing sewage disposal, nor for preventing the pollution of streams and lakes. The State Board of Health in this State is well-nigh powerless in taking initiative steps, particularly with regard to sewage disposal and stream pollution. It is high time State legislatures betook themselves to looking more into the all important art of sanitation and its far-reaching results and at once enact laws that will meet the advanced requirements of our daily living, and give such attention to the conservation of health and to the physical welfare of our homes as it in some cases has given to the welfare of the barn, the pigsty and their occupants. Had I the time I could refer to some very astonishing facts that might cause the blush of negligence to come to the faces of our Hoosier legislators.
Ohio has recently enacted a code of plumbing and drainage laws, containing provisions supposed to cover scientific sewage disposal. This code provides for and encourages contrivances that have been most soundly condemned by leading sanitarians both in this country and abroad for a century past.
It was Eugene Field who said:
“It seems to me I’d like to go
Where bells don’t ring or whistles blow
Nor clocks don’t strike nor gongs don’t sound,
And I’d have stillness all around,
Not real stillness, but just the trees
Low whispering of the hum of bees.”
What this tender poet wrote several years ago is increasingly being enacted today by the exodus of the prosperous captains of industry, of commerce and of the professions from their narrow city confines in unneighborly city neighborhoods to well appointed habitations in the outlying suburbs, or in his comfortable summer home up in the mountains or alongside the beautiful waters of some inland lake. These prosperous friends, though removing to the country, are unwilling to yield up any of the comforts and conveniences afforded by municipal service. Sewers usually unavailable in these more or less remote locations causes sewage disposal to become at once one of their most vexatious problems, so here comes a new demand for special skill in aiding our country gentlemen in establishing a satisfactory sanitary service that will tend to his comfort and respectability and prevent a menace to life and health. So all along the line the requirements for the sanitary uplift of home surroundings is widening, and the requirements in the daily living is enhancing, for modern sanitary methods of which sewage disposal is the most important are found to be most effective and therefore more necessary in the conservation of man’s most valuable asset—health. (Applause.)