Let me offer the health-seeker a few indications of the sanitary and hygienic requirements demanded by Nature’s normality. In our family and household life, to carry into execution daily hygienic measures, it is essential that we have ample, accessible conveniences for the necessary ablution of the body, externally and internally. How extremely rare it is, however, that bath-tubs and water-closets are found in sufficient quantity and suitable quality in our apartments. As household fixtures they are usually about as scarce as hens’ teeth. In New York City a house with from eight to sixteen persons is restricted to the use of one water-closet and one bath-tub. On these (and a laundry and servants’ privy in the basement) there is the tax of ten dollars a year. Now, should that rare human product, an enlightened and humane owner, put in eight more bath-tubs and water-closets for the proper accommodation of his sixteen guests, so that each suite of sleeping apartments should have its appropriate conveniences, he would have to pay an additional tax of forty dollars a year. Is this tax levied with the connivance of the Board of Health? It would seem so, since no protest from that august body has ever been heard within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. Indeed, the suspicion is not at all unwarranted that if the masses were less constipated and better washed they would have less use for the doctors, and that, therefore, it is not well to encourage undue sanitation and hygiene. It must be, too, that the Department of Water Supply has figured it out quite beautifully that a saving will be insured in the amount of water consumed by sixteen persons if they be restricted to one bath-tub and one water-closet; otherwise forty dollars a year would not be charged for eight additional tubs and closets for the use of the same number of persons. Listen to a sample of their logic: “Sixteen persons with eight additional bath-tubs and water-closets would use more water than if they were restricted to one of each--hence the additional tax. We don’t care a continental whether these human beings are clean externally or internally; that’s not our lookout. But we do care that they shouldn’t use more water than just so much, see!” And does the august Board of Health raise the least objection to this sort of logic? None whatever. Professor C. S. Smith states that, out of 255,000 families in tenement-houses in the city of New York, only 306 had access to bath-tubs in their own homes in 1894. In 1897 one city block containing 904 families did not have a single bath-tub.