The whole political organization of rural communities needs new attention, and perhaps radical overhauling. As I write these sentences, I have before me a newspaper in which a progressive surgeon expresses his opinion (which he has verified for me) on the question of supervision of health in a rural county in an Eastern state. He found the statistics too inaccurate and too indefinite to enable him to draw exact conclusions, but these are approximately the facts: "No township seems to have deliberately paid its health officer, and but one town deliberately paid its poor physician. The others paid various bills for 'quarantine' and 'fumigating' and 'fees' and other misleading items. There was no way in which to distinguish between the care of the poor and the sick-poor except to guess and to figure on what I happened to know about. A----, the richest and largest township, has no health officers, and spent $200 for the poor in a population of 4000 people living in an area of 93 square miles. B----, the poorest township, with a population of 1000, and an area of 36 square miles, paid her health officer $28 and her poor physician $23. "One township has 2170 inhabitants living in 51 square miles of territory, worth one and one-eighth million dollars. Its supervisor is paid $352.95 a year for a few days' work; its officers are paid $612.95. It costs $274.79 each year to elect these officers, and I understand each township is to spend about $5000 for good roads. The health officer that cares for these 2000 people over 51 miles of territory gets $42.53 a year, and the poor physician $34; while the sick-poor get helped to the munificent sum of $59.36, or two and one-half cents from each citizen. The health officers get almost exactly two cents a head for caring for the inhabitants over 51 square miles of land. The supervisor gets out of each inhabitant seventeen cents a year, the officers get thirty cents, while the sick-poor take from each citizen almost three cents. The discrepancy is too glaring to need comment. A community assessed a million dollars and probably worth two millions spends $40 a year on public health, and $60 a year on one-sixteenth of its population for sickness."