The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns, limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience, can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.
The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.
Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at least as valuable as that of the cumbrous forces of destruction?
In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed more than sword and steel. We lament this—in armies. We prefer to keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.
Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in money—annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting not only lifetimes, but the accumulating succession of lifetimes to the study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so live as to be well."
See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered; a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced—a disease is conquered.
This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against pleuro-pneumonia—in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked that disease, and stamped it out completely.
There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.
But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the kitchen mind.
it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!