Legislative bodies have hitherto slighted their responsibilities toward public health. The chairman of a committee on public health of a state legislature was heard to remark, "I asked for that committee because there isn't a blooming thing to do." If voters, nonvoters, and health officials will follow the suggestion of this book to secure school and health reports that will disclose community and health needs, it will be increasingly difficult for legislators to refuse funds necessary to efficient health administration. To the courts tradition has required such deference that one hesitates to find out in how far they have been responsible in the past for the nonenforcement of health laws. Yet nothing is more obstructive of sanitary progress than the failure of magistrates to enforce adequate penalties for truancy, adulteration of milk, maintaining a public nuisance, defiling the air with black smoke, offering putrid meats for sale, running an unclean lodging house, defying tenement-house or factory regulations, working children under age and overtime, spitting in public places, or failing to register transmissible diseases.[16] The appointing officer cannot, of course, be held responsible unless voters and nonvoters know in how far his appointees are inefficient, and in how far he himself has failed to do his utmost to secure funds necessary to efficiency. Too frequently appointments to health positions have been made on political grounds, and catastrophes have been met by blundering incapacity. The political appointee has been made the scapegoat, and the appointing officer, whether mayor, governor, or president, has regained public confidence by replacing an old with a new incompetent. In order to have health machinery work properly, the appointing officer should not be allowed to shift responsibility for failure to his subordinates. For example, it was recently found in New York City that while the tenement-house commissioner was being condemned for failing to enforce the law, he had turned over to the corporation counsel, also appointed by the mayor, for prosecution ten thousand "violations" to which no attention whatever had been paid! The voter, nonvoter, appointing officer, legislative officer, and judicial officer determine the character and purpose of machinery and are analogous to the surveyors, stock-holders, directors, and constructors who provide railroads with tracks and with running stock. The actual running force of health department or railroad is what is meant by its official machinery. What this machinery should be depends, of course, upon the amount of business to be done, and differs with the size of the district and the character of population to be served. [Illustration: FOR PUSH-CART FOOD, INSPECTION IS PARTICULARLY NEEDFUL]