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upon everybody else carrying it out. " No one lives for himself,"
is the principle which lies at the bottom of all sanitary work, and
many men adopt it up to a point—that is, they recognise that their
neighbour's life and habits closely concern their own comfort, and
that for their neighbours to have broken traps and nuisance
accumulations on their premises are grievous wrongs to them and
to their families, inasmuch as they poison the air that they have to
breathe. But such people do not quite see that they themselves
live for their neighbours, and as a result of this blindness, they
become singularly careless of sanitary principles, when circumstances
compel us to serve them with an official notice to abate a nuisance.
The fact is, the public are not downright awake to the importance
of our work. They are not altogether asleep, it is true ; nevertheless,
they are not awake. We may teach,—but they refuse to learn.
Medical officers of health write books and reports telling of sanitary
laws and hygienic requirements; but how often do these remain
unread or even uncut by those who receive them. Mines of
practical truths relating to health these reports often are, and yet I
fear their readers are comparatively few. A question of such
miserable importance as a halfpenny rate seems to stir up fifty
times the interest, and to be treated as of fifty times the importance
that the sublime topics of health and disease—the preservation of
the one, the prevention of the other, excite. It is the old story over
again : " We have piped unto you, but ye have not danced." There
is a fault somewhere. Does the fault consist in the circumstance
(as some think) that our piping has been too classical to excite
animation, or too scientific to be popular ? It may be so, but
whatever it is, this is certain, that the visit of a sanitary inspector is
often regarded as an infinitely greater grievance than the nuisance
he seeks to remedy, whilst your orders as a sanitary authority are
deemed an infringement of the liberties of the people, although all
we do is we believe for the benefit of the people themselves.
I have a more serious charge to make, and I make it advisedly.
It certainly appears to me that those who ought to be foremost in
helping our sanitary work, who should constitute themselves the
source of our information on general sanitary questions, a centre
where sanitary officers may obtain details of what others are doing
what hygienic, precautions and systems they have found to answer,