2. School discipline should be placed in charge of a student council.
3. The age limit of compulsory school attendance should be raised to sixteen years.
CHAPTER XXVI
PUBLIC HEALTH AND SANITATION
The purpose of this chapter is to point out what things endanger the public health and what means are taken to safeguard the people against them.
Health and efficiency.
A Highly Important Matter.—Nothing among all the activities of modern government is more important than the care of the public health. Its importance cannot be measured in dollars and cents or in figures of any kind. The health of the individual is the greatest of all factors in personal efficiency; no man, woman, or child can do the best work in any field of activity if hampered by disease, however slight. The health of the community is likewise essential to its progress and prosperity. Health protection, accordingly, is not a matter which can safely be left to everyone’s discretion. Some people would realize the necessity of safeguarding themselves and their families against disease; but others would not, and their neglect would entail danger to the whole community. Some people would know how to avoid ill-health, so far as it can be avoided; but others would not possess this knowledge and would suffer for lack of it.[[251]] A man’s religious or political belief may be his own personal concern; but his ideas of cleanliness and disease prevention are not. People who lay themselves open to disease constitute a danger to all those around them. In earlier days, when the population was scattered and not brought into contact the need for social control of the public health was less imperative. Today, when millions of people live in crowded cities where they come hourly into contact with one another the safeguarding of the public health constitutes a governmental task of the first importance and magnitude.
Old and New Ideas Concerning Health Protection.—No science has made greater progress during the past hundred years than the science of preventive medicine. In early times all diseases were looked upon as due to the same cause, namely, the anger of the gods for some misdoing on the part of the individual or the community.[[252]] The usual course, when a pestilence came upon the people, was to go through ceremonies and offer sacrifices in order that this anger might be appeased.
The great plagues of olden days.
Great plagues swept over Europe almost unchecked for a thousand years. In every community there were healers and medicine-men, who claimed to possess magic arts in dealing with all human ailments but, as a grim truth, nobody had the remotest idea as to what brought these epidemics, or how they were spread, or what might be done to prevent them. It is said that the Black Death in the fourteenth century carried off one-third of all the people in England. Whole towns were swept out of existence. Knowledge concerning the nature of disease and the methods of preventing it developed very slowly for many centuries, because many superstitions had to be broken down, and only within quite modern times did health protection reach the stage where it could properly be called a science.
The germ theory of disease.