"Sanitation and Sanity.--The general subject of sanitation now covers our architecture and our home life; our sewerage and disposition of waste; our personal cleanliness and contact in all social relations; our food and drink, both as to quality and kind; quarantine and other preventives against contagion and infection; the purification of streams, and the cleansing of the air of smoke and foul vapors; in fact, the whole subject of health or wholeness. * * * A national board of health was as unthought of as was an Atlantic cable in 1800. But the fact that great epidemics were liable to invade us, and did invade us, led to a system of quarantine and to enforced vaccination. But the regulation by law of our social manners, so far as they bore on public health, was not undertaken to any extent until within the past decade. * * * Indeed, public sentiment is as yet so uninformed that thorough laws in the case could not be enacted or enforced. There is not a stream in the United States that can be kept entirely free from pollution. The sanitary value of this is not understood by even the intelligent populace. The drainage of swamps is neglected in the neighborhood of our larger cities." "St. Louis has tolerated inside her limits pools that have made fevers of a malarious sort, with spinal meningitis, as common as croup. Chicago has acres of rotting vegetable matter inside the corporation every autumn. The inroads of yellow fever have always been invited by the unsanitary condition of Southern towns. The reports of Surgeon-General Hamilton, last summer, showed that the pest found its first welcome in a town where sewerage was wholly neglected, and tons of rotting sawdust and refuse filled the heated air with fever conditions.