These are all practical questions, the importance of which cannot be over-emphasized. They concern the health and happiness of many millions of people and the destiny of the Republic itself.
INDIANA NOT INDIFFERENT.
Indiana has not been indifferent to this great movement. It has taken up the work of Conservation with full appreciation of its magnitude and its direct bearing upon the present and future of the State. Our interests are so diversified that our conservationists in all branches of the movement find full opportunity for the exercise of their activities.
We have an agricultural college which is doing much to advance agriculture, horticulture, stock raising and the like along advanced lines. Farmers are being interested in the necessity of cultivation of the soil and the importance of seed selection, drainage and the like. We have farmers’ short courses instituted by the college which are proving of immense value. We are conserving the health of the livestock upon the farms. Sanitation has played an important part in this branch of work, as it has upon the human side.
We have a board of forestry supported by the State, and a Forestry Association organized by the people; also a commission to protect the food supply of our lakes and streams. These are only a few of the evidences of our progress in Conservation.
We are conserving with particular care the health of our school children with admirable results. We have learned, somewhat slowly perhaps, that sound bodies and sound minds should and can go together, and that to educate the mind and allow the body to become diseased is false economy on the part of the State and is nothing short of a crime, committed through either our ignorance or indifference.
We have sought to guard against and cure occupational diseases which impair and disqualify so many wage earners. We have more and more sought to throw around them such safeguards as well protect them against injury and death, and then to provide an adequate measure of compensation in case of accident as one of the legitimate burdens upon industry of the community which ultimately rests upon the public.
HAVE REDUCED ACCIDENTS.
During the last fifteen years we have made much advance in the conservation of the health of our people. By rigid factory inspection we have reduced accidents to our workmen from machinery and by improved sanitation we have protected their health. We have also rigidly inspected our mines with like results.
In fifteen years diphtheria has decreased sixty per cent., consumption has decreased in this same period six to eight per cent.; deaths from typhoid fever have fallen in the last two years from almost two thousand to 936 in 1911. Education, better living, improved sanitation, and an efficient State Board of Health, with its excellent organization of health officers in every locality, the co-operation of the press in the education of the people and support of our health officers, have accomplished a great work in increasing in a very considerable degree the health, vigor and happiness of our people.