670 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
concerned. No branch of social progress during the past hun- dred years has a brighter history than this, and none offers so little theoretical opposition or so little prejudice; for in no other field of administration is it easier to prove by actual experience that good health pays better than bad health, and therefore that taxation in the interests of sanitary reform is something which benefits without burdening the majority. The lowest wage- earner is already beginning to associate his health with his capi- tal. Few there are who do not wish for a higher standard of life, and few there are who do not begin to see that healthful tenements and workshops, clean streets and playgrounds, whole- some food and drink, and adequate hospital accommodations and public baths, are helping them to raise that standard with a minimum amount of self-sacrifice. Already the New York Department of Health, under Mayor Low's administration, is helping in this campaign of popular education, and by its model sanitary service is indirectly, but slowly and surely, teaching the people the value of pure food and drink, how to care for their little children in hot weather, how to separate the sick from the well, and a host of other things which profoundly affect the death-rate of a city. For, after all, mere laws by themselves can do little. And the enormous sanitary improve- ments of the past century have been due, not alone to increased scientific training and better governmental machinery, but even more to that indirect diffusion of knowledge among the people which a modern department of health must inevitably help to exert.
The passing of the Ashbridge administration in Philadelphia, and the placing of a well-trained physician at the head of the new Department of Health .and Charities in that city, augur well for the future. And even if Tammany Hall does return to power in New York next autumn, the lessons which have been taught by Commissioner Lederle and some of his fellow-workers will not have been wholly lost. The masses who dwell in the great metropolis have certainly learned more than they ever knew before about the value of good health administration, and they will no more permit the future rulers of the city to neglect
