It is estimated that 1,500,000 of our people are constantly suffering from preventable disease, and that during the next ten years American lives equaling the population of the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States (about 6,000,000) will be needlessly destroyed if the present estimated mortality from preventable and postponable disease continues.
These are the conditions we are asking our people to correct. Is there anything unreasonable in the request?
The money loss is stupendous, but if this does not impress our people, surely they should be stirred to action when they reflect upon the immeasurable sum of sorrow, suffering, poverty, immorality, crime and the hereditary degeneracy which results from this wholesale wrecking and destruction of human life from preventable cause.
RACE SUICIDE.
We are not only reducing the fertility of our race and also shortening the span of life, but we are permitting at least 650,000 lives to be destroyed annually which we could save by the application of simple and well-known precautions.
This is the real race suicide problem.
If we would save these lives, they together with their natural offspring would solve the problem of maintaining an adequate surplus of births over deaths. What we need is not necessarily larger families, but more families. A larger number of small families is surely preferable to a smaller number of large families.
THE DOLLAR AND THE DEATH RATE.
The primary duty of conserving our human assets resting with the State, it is obvious that the State must lead in the national movement. It is, therefore, the first duty of every individual and of every unofficial organization interested in this efficiency and life-saving campaign to rally to the support of the public health service.
We must not only teach the individual how to guard his life against preventable disease and accident, we must educate our communities to the need of an effective public health service to enforce sanitary regulations and otherwise guard the health and lives of their members.