Public or governmental hygiene has been chiefly concerned with pure air and pure food, and with organisms producing epidemic diseases. Boards of health are a recent invention, and in this country they have as yet been only imperfectly developed. They can never become the power they should be until, first, public opinion better realizes their usefulness and the fact that their cost to the taxpayer is saved many times over by the prevention of death and disease; second, more and better health legislation is enacted--national, state, and municipal; and, third, special training is secured for what is really a new profession, that of a public health officer. _Report on National Vitality._ CHAPTER VIII LEGISLATIVE COMPULSION Government is delegated to persons specially set apart for the oversight of the people’s welfare. Personal conduct was free from such delegated power in the Anglo-Saxon thought. The Englishman’s house was his castle inviolate. This was especially true of the early American settlers. Laws interfering with personal liberty, a man’s right to drink tea, to punish his own children, to beat his own wife, to keep his own muck-heap, have been deeply resented by the American citizen. Each step in the protection of his neighbor has been taken only by a struggle extending the common law of nuisance to a variety of conditions. The protection of the man against himself, and of his wife and child against his ignorance or greed, is one of the twentieth century tasks yet hardly begun. The control of man’s environment for his own good as a function of government is a comparatively new idea in republican democracy. The cry of paternalism is quickly raised, on the one hand, of socialism, on the other. Each gain has been at the cost of a hard-fought battle. But it is certain that the individual must delegate more or less of his so-called rights for the sake of the race, and since the only excuse for the existence of the individual is the race, he must so far relinquish his authority. It is a part of the urban trend that the will of the man, of the head of the family, should be superseded by that of the community, city, state, nation. Even though all the agencies for the education of both young people and adults that have been discussed in the preceding chapters were set in motion at once, there would still remain many thousands in township and city untouched by these forces, or so touched as to arouse rebellion against such novel notions. Only the child can be educated to acquire habits of right living so perfectly that the suitable action takes place unconsciously. Twenty years hence these trained children will be the chief citizens of the republic, the leaders of public opinion. Today, however, less gentle means, less gradual processes, must be used in order that these children may have a chance to grow up.