It is not impossible to furnish a decent habitation for every productive laborer in all our great cities. Many really humane people are overawed by the authority, the pompous and powerful assertions of “successful” men of affairs; and they often sleep while such men are forming secret conspiracies against national health and morality with the aid of legal talent hired to kill. Only when the social mind and conscience is educated and the entire community becomes intelligent and alert can legislation be secured which places all competitors on a level where humanity is possible. Here, again, the monogamic family is the social interest at stake. It is a conflict for altars and fires. We are told that all these results are the effect of a natural, uniform tendency in the progress of the business world, and that it is useless to combat it. Professor Henderson reminds us that tendency to uniformity revealed by statistics may be reversed when resolute men and women, possessed of higher ideals, unite to resist it. Jacob A. Riis holds that these evils are not by a decree of fate, but are the result of positive wrong, and he dedicates his “Ten Years’ War” as follows--“to the faint-hearted and those of little faith.” In like manner we call today for more faith in a way out of the slough of despond, more resolute endeavor to improve social and economic conditions. We beg the leaders of public opinion to pause before they condemn the efforts making to teach those means of social control which may build yet again a home life that will prove the nursery of good citizens and of efficient men and women with a sense of responsibility to God and man for the use they make of their lives. INSTRUCTIVE INSPECTION Mrs. Richards intended to embody the following material in Chapter VIII of the second edition. Because of her death it has seemed best to add it as an appendix. WHITCOMB AND BARROWS. CHAPTER X INSTRUCTIVE INSPECTION[19] [19] Read before the American Public Health Association at Richmond, Va., October, 1909. The checking of wastes of all description is much in the air, but there is less discussion about WASTE OF EFFORT than might be expected. Yet effort means time, and saving of time saves lives as well as money. Nearly every investigation of sanitary evils leads back to the family home (or the lack of one), and a great deal of the health authorities’ work is saving at the spigot while there is a hundred times the waste at the bunghole. The medical inspection of the schools was found to have little effect without the visiting school nurse, for the parents did not know how to better conditions and in the majority of cases did not believe in the need.