were disease germs in that sugar. Don’t you think men who would sell such sugar, and men who would buy and make candy with it should be sent to prison?
In cities, a great deal more has to be done to protect the health of the people. Dirt is a disease breeder. Dirt, you know, is not just black earth. It is matter out of place. Mud is a fine thing in a rice field, but it is dirt on a little boy’s face. So, kitchen refuse is garbage in a house, but it is good food in a chicken yard and pig pen. Old boxes and newspapers litter a house, but are fine for kindling fires. Sewage water and stable soil poison people, but make plants in a field grow. Tin cans, old iron, old shoes, rags, bottles and bones can be made over into useful things in factories, and junk men will often give country children bright new pennies for saving them. If they cannot be sold they can be buried and, with ashes, used to fill in holes. On farms, and even in towns, where homes have large lots, each family can use or destroy its waste.
In cities, people have no gardens or chickens or pigs. Very often they burn gas for cooking, and cannot use up kindling. Bonfires in narrow alleys and on streets are dangerous, and destroy pavements. There must be good public housekeeping to take care of all the waste of all the people, or there would be dirt, disorder and sickness that the cleanest person and the cleanest family could not avoid.
Public housekeeping in cities begins at street gutters and back gates. It is just like family housekeeping on a big scale. A family has a waste paper basket, a slop pail, a rag bag and an ash can, and does not allow members of the family to mix different kinds of waste, or to scatter trash. The streets and alleys are everybody’s floor. Everybody has to pay the city a little in taxes to keep the public A floor clean, and to carry away, destroy or use the waste. Everyone is expected to help in this work, by following the same sensible rules that orderly families make for themselves.
In the alley behind each house there must be covered iron garbage and ash cans. These are collected in separate wagons. Other wagons take away junk. Ashes and street sweepings are used for filling in low ground. In this way green parks have been made on swamps. Bones are sold to factories, to be ground into bone meal. One factory buys old iron and other metals. Another takes old shoes, another the wooden boxes and furniture. Rags and paper go to a paper mill. Garbage is burned in great furnaces that often save the fat for soap factories. London, in its poorest part, burns
