If progress is to be real and lasting, it must provide whatever bulwarks it can against death, sickness, misery, and ignorance; and in an organization such as a national department of health, adequately equipped,--a vast preventive machine working ceaselessly,--an attempt at least would be made to stanch those prodigal wastes of an old yet wastrel world. Among the branches of the work proposed for the national bureau are the following: infant hygiene; health education in schools; sanitation; pure food; registration of physicians and surgeons; registration of drugs, druggists, and drug manufacturers; registration of institutions of public and private relief, correction, detention and residence; organic diseases; quarantine; immigration; labor conditions; disseminating health information; research libraries and equipment; statistical clearing house for information. Given such a national center for health facts or vital statistics, there will be a continuing pressure upon state, county, and city health officers, upon physicians, hospitals, schools, and industries to report promptly facts of birth, sickness, and death to national and state centers able and eager to interpret the meaning of these facts in such simple language, and with such convincing illustrations, that the reading public will demand the prompt correction of preventable evils. Our tardiness in establishing a national board of health that shall do this great educational work is due in part to the fact that American sanitarians have frequently chosen to _do things_ when they should have chosen to _get things done_. Almost every state has its board of health, with authority to require registration of births, deaths, and sickness due to transmissible disease; with few exceptions the heads of these state boards have spent their energies in abating nuisances. In a short time they have degenerated into local scavengers, because they have shown the public neither the meaning of the vital statistics gathered nor its duty to support efficient health administration. The state reports of vital statistics have not been accurate; therefore in many states we have the anomalous situation of an aggressive veterinary board arousing the farmer and the consumer of milk to the necessity of protecting the health of cattle, and an inactive, uninformed state board of health failing to protect the health of the farmer and the consumer.