“The Department of Agriculture spends seven million dollars on plant health and animal health every year, but, with the exception of the splendid work done by Doctors Wiley, Atwater, and Benedict, Congress does not directly appropriate one cent for promoting the physical well-being of babies. Thousands have been expended in stamping out cholera among swine, but not one dollar was ever voted for eradicating pneumonia among human beings. Hundreds of thousands are consumed in saving the lives of elm trees from the attacks of beetles; in warning farmers against blights affecting potato plants; the importing Sicilian bugs to fertilize fig blossoms in California; in ostracizing various species of weeds from the ranks of the useful plants, and in exterminating parasitic growths that prey on fruit trees. In fact, the Department of Agriculture has expended during the last ten years over forty-sixmillions of dollars. But not a wheel of the official machinery at Washington was ever set in motion for the alleviation or cure of diseases of the heart or kidneys, which will carry off over six millions of our entire population. Eight millions will perish of pneumonia, and the entire event is accepted by the American people with a resignation equal to that of the Hindoo, who, in the midst of indescribable filth, calmly awaits the day of cholera. “During the next census period more than six million infants under two years of age will end their little spans of life while mothers sit by and watch in utter helplessness. And yet this number could probably be decreased by as much as half. But nothing is done. “In the United States alone, of the eighty millions living to-day, all must die, after having lived, say a little more than three billion, two hundred million years of life, on the average slightly more than twoscore years. Of these years, one billion, six hundred million, represent the unproductive years of childhood and training. “Consider that the burden of the unproductive years on the productive years is 20-20, or say 100 per cent. Could the average length of life be increased to sixty years, say to forty-eight billion years lived by eighty millions of people, the burden of the unproductive years would fall to 50 per cent. In the judgment of men competent to hold opinions, this is not impossible.” It was the reading of this paper, which led to the formation of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health, of which Professor Irving Fisher of Yale is president, and which includes among its members such men and women as Ex-President Eliot of Harvard, Dr. Lyman Abbott, Miss Jane Addams, Luther Burbank, Horace Fletcher, Professor Chittenden, Dr. Kellogg, and Dr. Trudeau.