If this program were put through, tuberculosis would cease as soon as those who are now infected should either have recovered or died. It is because such a program has not been put through that, according to Professor Fisher, there are always 500,000 Americans suffering from tuberculosis, and the annual death-roll from the disease is 150,000. Any municipal government, if it were disposed to do so and the courts were willing to let it do so, could put through the housing part of the program in a single summer. The dangerous habitations could be condemned. The government, if necessary, could build and rent at cost, sanitary houses in the suburbs, as the government of New Zealand does for its people. Congress, the President and the courts, if they were disposed to do so, could reduce the cost of living. If the government can teach farmers by mail how to prevent hog-cholera, there would seem to be no reason why it should not teach human beings by mail to breathe fresh air both night and day. What stands in the way of immediately putting through such a program? Nothing in the world except the men whose property would be destroyed, or whose stealings in food-prices would be stopped. The property loss would be enormous. (Think of calling the destruction of a lot of death-traps a “loss.”) The “value” of the property destroyed might be a billion dollars. Maybe it would be two billions. What difference need it make if it should take five billion dollars’ worth of labor, lumber, bricks, steel and other materials to replace death-traps with life-traps? One hundred and fifty thousand lives would be saved every year from tuberculosis alone, and the rebuilding operations would create greater prosperity for labor than was ever created by any act of Congress. A hundred years ago, no one knew how to stamp out tuberculosis. What good does it do us to know how? We are not permitted to apply our knowledge. We can peck away if we want to, at the edge of the problem, but we mustn’t strike at the middle. If we should, we might cut somebody’s dividends. We might interfere with the “vested interests” of the owners of the cellars in which 25,000 New York families live, or with the owners of the 101,000 windowless rooms in which New Yorkers live, or with the owners of the unsanitary houses and factories in other cities. Our public officials know better than to try to do anything really radical in the health line. They have condemned just enough pestholes to know how dangerous it is to political prospects to grapple with property, and enforced just enough of the factory laws to know how dangerous it is to try to enforce factory laws at all.