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5
to submit for consideration to-day is whether we are
even commencing any real advance toward the formation
of that raw material, admitted by all to be so
necessary if any lasting improvement is to be effected.
Whilst it is obviously true that so far as property
is concerned most of the cruder features and more
coarse conditions arising from neglected sanitation
have, as the result of some years of effort, been swept
away, the lamentable fact remains that the actual
physical condition of our people as seen day by day
in their homes and lives is not at all in accordance
with the most elementary requirements necessary for
the continuance of a healthy race.
The absence of proper facilities for the practising
of domestic and personal hygiene as a part of the
ordinary everyday habit is resulting in an almost
general neglect and absence of desire to practice any
effective system of domestic hygiene or personal sanitation.
This want of cleanliness in the home and
person invites, nay, challenges consideration of the
point whether much of our so-called progress is not of
a somewhat negative quality.
Year in and year out we visit approximately some
six hundred "homes" in every week. Were it
possible to reproduce the actual conditions found
existing in some hundreds of these "homes," I feel
pretty certain that the most optimistic of our reformers
would agree it was high time to hark back, and
to begin again on sounder lines.