The second preaches the gospel of work and self-control, which must be practised in this as in every other connection where progress and good results are desired.
The third enforces the doctrine of cleanliness to a degree as comprehensive as it is unusual—cleanliness in person, dwelling, and food; in air, water, and decoration; in occupation, environment and morals; the work of home hygiene being to secure for each family conditions which will permit normal and unhampered functioning for all the organs of each one of its members; elasticity and pliancy in the functions being a primary characteristic of health.
If once it be accepted that health, capacity, endurance, and energy are more powerful weapons 218 for a progressive people than are sword or gun, obedience to these commands will be general and their results enduring. The pages of history teach us that each nation in turn has exhibited these qualities at its zenith of success, whether it were the relatively highly civilised inhabitants of Greece and Rome, or the barbarian hordes under Attila. They characterise equally each group of successful pioneers, whether they be the Pilgrim Fathers of the sixteenth, the Huguenots of the seventeenth, or the successful colonist of the nineteenth century. When however their cultivation is neglected the force of the life current of a people or community is lost; the mighty river of a nation’s prosperity dwindles to an insignificant streamlet of mere existence, soon to be lost to view in the morass of oblivion.
To what general causes may such deterioration be attributed? Among the more prominent must be mentioned ignorance of man’s physical nature and of the nurture essential to his welfare; subtle forms of self-indulgence; lowered standards of morality; enervating luxury, or, in some cases, so severe a struggle for existence among the salt of the population (the upper, middle, and professional classes, superior mechanics and artisans), that even patriotism does not justify a quiverful of children. But the persistence of these causes is a national calamity. It is the science and art of hygiene which is emphasising their disastrous consequences. No longer in its infancy, no longer a mere collection of fads, questionable statistics, and empirical doctrines, 219 hygiene is prepared to inform us how to promote human efficiency in every relation of life—domestic, occupational, social, and imperial. Its tenets are firmly based upon a goodly group of sciences, and their utilisation call into play a whole range of arts. Its theories find confirmation in the social problems of the day, and the experience gained from their tentative and partial application affords sound evidence of their worth to the world. The “expectation” of life, for instance, has been extended ten years in half a century; in twenty years the death-rate has decreased thirty per cent. Disease has been found in most instances to be controllable, and has been controlled; unhealthy occupations have had their dangers curbed if not entirely banished, and the lot of many has been immeasurably brightened. Yet the weak joints in the nation’s harness are gaping, and the vigour and virility of the masses appear to be diminishing. Again we ask, Why?
III. STAGES IN THE GROWTH OF SANITARY SCIENCE
The answer may be found by reference to the late Professor de Chaumont’s now classical outline of the stages to be identified in the hygienic education of a race. He divided these into three periods, of which he described the first as merely “Instinctive,” for efforts after sanitary practice were dictated solely by the personal discomfort associated with their neglect. In those far-off 220 prehistoric days, Professor Boyd Dawkins tells us that primitive man, then in his nomadic stage, would dig runnels to carry off the rain water from the near neighbourhood of his shelters, or would move on to fresh pastures when his family and herds had fouled the nearest stream, or change his camping ground when the accumulated refuse of his food and his prowess as a hunter interfered with convenient access to his dwelling; but he took no precautions to prevent the recurrence of these discomforts, and his efforts to remove their consequences were purely temporary.
To this there succeeded what Professor de Chaumont designated the “Supernatural” period,[96] which extended over many thousands of years, during the dawn of which Eastern rulers often combined in their own person the triple callings of priest, prophet, and physician. Whether it be in China or in Persia, in Egypt or in India, among the Greeks, the Arabs, or the Hebrews, the practice of physical morality and of personal cleanliness, of restrictions of diet or protection from infection, were closely woven into the religion of the people. Reasons of health and sanitary advantages permeate the rules of more faiths than that of the Jews—whose Lawgiver embodied in the Pentateuch health maxims now known to have been derived from earlier civilisations.
But, remarkable and interesting as are the ancient sanitary codes to a generation which 221 professes to believe in the necessity for hygienic practice, their usage was tinctured from the first by a mass of superstition. Tradition and fatalism hampered true consistency between faith and works; the often sound regulations suffered from their empirical foundations. Constant warfare, varied by alternations of luxury with asceticism, combined to absorb men’s minds and to pervert their common sense, so that plague and famine, disease and penury, were superstitiously regarded as discipline from the Deity, not to be averted or avoided, but rather to be accepted as a chastisement prompted by love. The creed that to save suffering to the vile body might risk the salvation of the soul, cost Europe far dearer than is at all generally recognised; for the noble, the pure, the high-minded, the intellectual, segregated themselves for centuries in monastery and convent, in the firm faith that by denying to themselves the joy of parenthood they promoted the spiritual welfare of their country. Ignorant of their racial responsibilities, they left as progenitors of the next generation the less refined and ruder elements in the population. It is no cause for surprise, therefore, that progress in sanitation moved slowly. Domestic and urban conditions were permitted of a character well defined by the facts that, in mediæval times, a man of forty-five or fifty was considered long lived, and that first attempts to control disease were based upon commercial convenience rather than upon the saving of life.
To this long night of superstition succeeded the third and last period, known as the “Rational,” of which the first dawnings can be detected even in Plantagenet days. In this period it is desirable further to differentiate three stages of progress—(a) that of Development, when uneasiness made itself felt, but from absence of knowledge efforts at reform and control were crude, though often intelligent; (b) the stage of Legislation, and (c) the stage of Freedom.[97]