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Workshop legislation in the interest of the health of the workers
is gathering some of the best fruit of preventive medicine. Dust
diseases are exacting a rapidly diminishing toll of diseases of the chest,
and the notified cases of poisoning by lead, phosphorus, arsenic,
mercury, and of anthrax were, in 1903, only about half of those
notified as recently as five years ago. But if all factories and
workshops could be efficiently ventilated, and at the same time kept
at a reasonable temperature (conditions which 1 regard as physical
impossibilities in many of the workrooms which I have visited, unless
they are reconstructed) then a large section of the community would
be spared a considerable amount of preventable illness, would become
more healthy and vigorous, and soon repay the preliminary outlay by
work more quickly and better performed. Many occupations still sin
against the children, either directly by working them under unfavourable
conditions during the period which shou'd be devoted to education
and physical growth, or indirectly by injuring the parents' health and
lowering their vital state during the reproductive period of their lives.
Cheap and effective transit so that the wives and children of workmen
may have the benefit of fresh air and more rcomy and cheerful
surroundings; or, what is better still, the establishment of works and
factories in country districts (as in the Garden City scheme) would
do much to promote the physical, mental, moral, and social welfare of
the workers.
THE HOUSING QUESTION.
From whatever direction we approach the consideration of
questions affecting the health and physical development of the people,
we soon come upon the housing question ; and though much has been
done and more is in store to improve the housing of the poorer
classes, it seems destined to remain a problem for which no complete
solution is to be found. One of the greatest services, therefore,
which science can render to healthy living at the present day,
is to devote its knowledge and inventive power to the problem of
simplifying, improving, and if possibly cheapening, the ordinary
middle-class houses and the homes or tenements in which the masses of