Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
Most of the rights we call inalienable are political rights no longer
questioned by anybody and no longer thought of in connection with our
everyday acts, pleasures, and necessities. When our political rights
were formulated in maxims, living was relatively simple. There was no
factory problem, no transportation problem, no exploitation of women
and children in industry. Our ancestors firmly believed that if the
strong could be prevented from interfering with the political rights of
the weak, all would have an equal chance. The reason that our political
maxims mean less to-day than two hundred years ago is that nobody is
challenging our right to move from place to place if we can afford it,
to trial by jury if charged with crime, to speak or print the truth
about men or governments. If, however, anybody should interfere with
our freedom in this respect, it would be of tremendous help that
everybody we know would resent such interference and would point to
maxims handed down by our ancestors and incorporated in our national
and state constitutions as formal expressions of unanimous public
opinion.
The time is past when any one seriously believes that political freedom
or personal liberty will be universal, just because everybody has a
right to talk, to move from place to place, to print stories in the
newspapers. The relation of man to man to-day requires that we
formulate rules of action that prevent one man's taking from another
those rights, economic and industrial, that are as essential to
twentieth-century happiness as were political rights to
eighteenth-century happiness. Political maxims showed how, through
common desire and common action, steps could be taken by the individual
and by the whole of society for the protection of all. Health rights,
likewise, are to be obtained through common action. A modern city must
know who is accountable when an automobile runs over a pedestrian, when
a train load of passengers lose their lives because of an engineer's
carelessness, when an employee is incapacitated for work by an accident
for which he is not responsible, or when fever epidemics threaten life
and liberty without check. How can a child who is prevented by
removable physical defects from breathing through his nose be
enthusiastic over free speech? Of what use is freedom of the press to
those who find reading harder than factory toil? How futile the right
to trial by jury if removable physical defects make children unable to
do what the law expects! Who would not exchange rights of petition for
ability to earn a living? Children permanently incapacitated to share
the law's benefits cannot appreciate the privilege of pursuing
happiness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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