In the meantime, it would be a splendid thing for the country if the Coal Trust would increase the price of coal a dollar a month until such time as the people become enough interested in their own problems to solve them. CHAPTER X DEATHBEDS AND DIVIDENDS Stock market reports do not show a relationship between deathbeds and dividends. Such a relationship exists, however. In this country, many are made to die miserably in order that a few may live magnificently. Every year, more than half a million human beings are compelled to die in order that a few thousands may make, every year, perhaps half a billion dollars. More than three millions are kept sick in order that a handful may be kept rich. This is not mere rhetoric. It is fact. Irving Fisher, Professor of Political Economy at Yale, and President of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health, is one of the authorities for the figures. In his report on national vitality, to the Conservation Commission, he declared that in this country, every year, 600,000 human beings die whose lives might be saved; that there are constantly 3,000,000 ill who might be well. Dr. Woods Hutchinson, New York physician, endorses these estimates. Moreover, the estimates are confirmed by the actual experience of New Zealand. New Zealand’s death-rate is 9.5 to the thousand. Our death-rate is 16.5 to the thousand. If New Zealand’s population were as great as our own, the number of deaths each year, under her present rate, would be 630,000 fewer than the number of Americans who die each year. Yet the climate of New Zealand is no more healthful than is that of America. New Zealand simply does not sacrifice her people to private greed. America does. Plenty of laymen know how typhoid could be made a dead disease. Germany has already made typhoid all but a dead disease in Germany. Yet, in this country, tuberculosis, typhoid and other diseases that could easily be prevented, are permitted to go on, killing their millions. Why? Because capitalism stands in the way. Because deathbeds could not be decreased in number without decreasing dividends in size. Because we can reduce the death-rate only by acting through our governments—national, state and municipal—and big business, rather than ourselves, controls these governments. Big business, desiring to keep the special privileges it has and to get more, puts men into office whom it believes will do its bidding. Usually, these men know nothing and care nothing about promoting the public health. They are politicians. If they do know something about promoting the public health, and attempt to apply their knowledge at the expense of somebody’s dividends, there is a fight. If it is a disease-infected tenement that it is desired to tear down, the injunction is brought into play.