Deaths from Pulmonary Tuberculosis: 1909 1400 1910 1234 1911 1165 1912 1189 1913 1129 There is nothing spectacular about this. It is heartbreakingly slow—needlessly, uselessly slow work. Yet it is progressing in the right direction. =Tuberculosis and Poverty.= Throughout the foregoing pages we have considered the direct method of dealing with tuberculosis—the removal or segregation of the distributor. But there is also an indirect method of dealing with tuberculosis, namely the abolishment of poverty. Tuberculosis recruits full fifty per cent. of its ranks from people of a certain social level—the very poor. This class is composed of people habitually overworked, underpaid, and subject to all the deteriorating influences of unsanitary and vicious environment, and to the ignorance and degradation which follow in the wake of extreme distress. The root cause of these conditions is our present unjust economic system, which produces an excess of luxury and frivolity on the one hand, and on the other an army of people who must forego the barest necessities of life. One class is maintained at the expense of the other. Every movement which seeks to abolish this injustice, and to substitute a fairer and more equable system, is a movement which at the same time tends to raise the standard of public health. Any legislation, social or revolutionary, which makes for the improvement of industrial conditions, raises the level of public health through raising the welfare (_i.e._, resistance) of the individual. Therefore, sweeping readjustment of social and economic conditions would automatically eliminate an enormous amount of disease, by reducing the number of highly susceptible individuals. To increase the number of people with high resistance—or to decrease the number of people with low resistance, whichever way one chooses to put it—would probably diminish the amount of tuberculosis by about one half. This indirect method—the readjustment of social conditions and the abolishment of poverty—valuable as it would be, would still leave the problem unsolved. Even diminished by one half, the amount of tuberculosis would still be formidable, and we should have to attack it as vigorously as ever, if not to the same extent. The disease would still exist, just as it now exists in well-to-do families in small towns, in rural districts, and in other circumstances attributable to neither poverty nor bad industrial conditions.