and disposed of in small holdings. But the former owners have profited 'by the "unearned increment," and many who would have made homes in the country have been compelled to join that sorrowful army that has so long been marching into the cities in ever-increasing numbers. The last buyer of the acres of the large land-holdings pays many times the price for it that the government—that is, the people-disposed of it for in order to "settle up the country" and "encourage and promote agriculture."

The farming-land situation is in process of settling itself-at great cost, to be sure, to those who are settling it. But the forest-land situation is still bad and growing worse all the time. The government, it is true, has set aside certain forest reservations, totaling one hundred fifty million acres, half again as large as the state of California. But the remaining two hundred twenty-five million acres, over twice as large as California, are held by less than two hundred individuals and corporations.

It would not be so bad, from the standpoint of the conservationists, if unrestricted private ownership of forest land did not mean its absolute destruction as forest land. For private owners, very naturally and very humanly, insist on making the most money possible out of their holdings when they submit them to the ax. And that means, of course, the absolute destruction of the forests. It is not necessary, I think, to demonstrate before you the absolute necessity of the forests to human progress and prosperity. We need perennial streams for river navigation, irrigation, and power and freedom from destructive floods.

Some of the private owners of large tracts of forest lands are holding them untouched by the ax; and they imagine that this is conservation. It is not. For conservation means use. And forests may be used, are being used in other countries, without reducing their areas or productivity.

There is, however, hope for the future. Even the courts, conservative to the verge of mulishness, are beginning to see the necessity for the protection of the body politic from those who have been given public property. The Supreme Court of Maine, speaking of private real property, said this:

First, such property is not the result of productive labor, but is derived solely from the State itself, the original owner; second, the amount of land being incapable of increase, if the owners of large tracts can waste them at will without State restriction, the State and its people may be hopelessly impoverished and one great purpose of government defeated.

And the Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey has said this:

The State, as quasi-sovereign and representative of the public, has a standing in court to protect the atmosphere, the water and the forests within its territory, irrespective of the assent or dissent of the private owners of land most immediately concerned.

Maybe this is socialistic, communistic, even anarchistic. But let us hope that the supreme courts of all the states and the Supreme Court of the United States may soon become as socialistic, communistic, and anarchistic as the supreme courts of the old states of Maine and New Jersey.

Let us hope that all the courts, subordinate and supreme, in every state in the Union, may soon be able to appreciate the necessity for the conservation of all our natural resources, and that they may, all and singular, soon learn that the public good, present and future, is of infinitely more importance and value than any man's private property, especially when waste and destruction of that property will work an irreparable injury to the public.

The theory under which our natural resources have been given away is the perfectly correct one that they should be used for the benefit of the public. A coal mine or a water-power that is not used is of no benefit to the public. When, therefore, natural resources are given away by the people and put into cold storage by those to whom they are given, the theory upon which they were given away is ruthlessly violated in its fundamental assumption. For the only present use to which cold-storaged natural resources are put is the use of artificially keeping up or increasing the price of the products of the things we gave away.

Water-powers, land, and minerals are, next to the forests, the most necessary of all our natural resources. They must be husbanded; they must not be unnecessarily wasted or destroyed, if those whose educational footsteps the teachers of this country are guiding shall not be robbed of that which, by moral and divine, if not by statute, law, is rightfully theirs.

I know of no class of our people who can do more than our teachers to inculcate into the minds of the people of this country the ideas of conservation. The Johnny and Mary of today will be the Mr. Smith and the Mrs. Brown of tomorrow. While, as "young ideas," they are being taught to shoot in other directions, let them also be taught that there is a conservation target, a bright and shining one, at which their aim should be directed, and bound up in which are their future prosperity and material happiness. Let them also be taught that what is ours today will be theirs tomorrow, and that they have the right to demand that we shall hand over to them their property undiminished in value and volume except in so far as that value and that volume may be diminished by our reasonable, careful, and necessary use of it.

NATIONAL VITALITY

WILLIAM F. SNOW, M.D., SECRETARY, CALIFORNIA STATE BOARD OF HEALTH, SACRAMENTO, CAL.

All who have occasion to glance thru the many literary and scientific. periodicals as they appear on our news stands from month to month must be impressed with the increasing frequency with which articles on health appear. There can be no doubt that the nation is awakening to a realization of the great possibilties of health conservation. The remarkable Report on National Vitality prepared for the National Conservation Com

mission by Professor Irving Fisher, and published in 1909, has had much to do with this awakening. The realization of the great saving of human life now proven to be scientifically possible can only be brought about thru educating the public in the application of the hygienic and sanitary principles involved.

In the first place parents must be taught that planting good health does not differ in principle from planting any other crop. Good seed must be sown in the right soil and with due regard to the environment. Many things must be done between the planting and the harvest if one expects a maximum yield. The fruit farmer follows up his planting by making a business of aiding the growth of his trees. He protects them against drought by irrigation, against frost by smudging, against insect pests by fumigation and by the importation of friendly insects to prey upon the pest. The infant trees are wrapped in swaddling clothes in winter and provided with sun shades in summer. Being clothed they must be fed. The farmer studies their diet and buys the necessary fertilizing chemicals advocated by the horticultural experts. Their leaves must have sun and their roots must be housed in properly ventilated soil; therefore, the farmer cultivates his land and battles with the weeds. And all the time he is saying to himself: "In a few years more they will begin to bear fruit." The placing of wind stakes and props, the digging for borers, the all-night irrigation, the fight with the birds and the rabbits, are but incidents in the day's work of the successful fruit farmer. All these things about the growing of trees the public understands and practices. Similar things are known and practiced in the growing of animals, but the growing of humans has never been taught as an important business enterprise. There are two great reasons for this. In the first place, the normal baby born to healthy parents has a tremendous vitality and power of adaptability to its environment, which distinguishes it from the little tree. This gives rise to the impression that with the baby the proportions of food and sleep, air and sunshine, work and play, are of little consequence. In the second place, from fifteen to twenty years are required to mature the crop, which since the days of slavery has had no directly quotable market value when produced.

It can be demonstrated, however, that good health is a valuable crop. Each of us, for example, expects to live to be at least sixty or seventy years old. And if we come of good stock, have been carefully cultivated, and have developed good habits we ought to live so long. Yet each of us knows of a number of friends with similar expectations who became blighted and died. Some of tuberculosis, some of typhoid fever, or malaria, or diphtheria, or scarlet fever, or any one of a hundred other causes. When we stop to think of it most of them died before the age of thirty or thirtyfive. The twenty years or more they might have lived would have been most valuable to the prosperity of our nation. Many of these friends

have been young men with families. Each man's labor would have provided at least one thousand dollars a year, which means a loss of at least twenty thousand dollars to thirty thousand dollars for his family.

The public must be taught that the problem of conserving national vitality is not in preventing death so much as in postponing it. On every hand one hears the statement "Well, I've got to die sometime"; but it makes a very great difference in the nation's prosperity and in the happiness of individual homes whether this event transpires before twenty-five or after fifty years of age.

Growing humans is an industry which far outranks all others in importance to the nation, but it has not been properly taught. President Jordan says:

The best gift to a baby is a healthy father and mother-physically healthy, mentally healthy, morally healthy. Such a gift is not to be found every day, but it is rather to be chosen than great riches. It is great riches, for, accident or mischance aside, it means efficient life, joyous life, life that is worth while.

This is absolutely true, but the means for developing such gifts has not been perfected. Our schools have struggled with partial success to provide the "mentally healthy" part of the gift. Our churches have struggled with less degree of success to provide the "morally healthy" part of this gift. It has been nobody's business to provide the "physically healthy" part of this great gift to the baby; so nobody has done it. We are all at fault-educators, ministers, statesmen, laymen, all alike. We have been too much occupied with our personal affairs to give the child in his entirety a thought. President Wheeler referring forcibly to the importance of the family in California's future, said:

It is my observation that the finest thing in life is a strong man, married to a strong woman, living within their means, and providing the personal care and physical necessities for the up-bringing of strong children.

These are the statements of presidents of universities that rank among those most progressive in the United States today; yet the curriculum of either institution will hardly stand investigation in the light of its president's statement. Our universities are doing practically nothing to train our young men and young women in the knowledge essential to the building of happy, successful homes, and providing the baby with that best of gifts so well described by President Jordan.

It

If this were true only of our universities it would not matter so greatly, for less than 3 per cent of our school children graduate from them. does matter that our grammar schools fail to grasp their opportunity to adequately teach health conservation. In California, as doubtless in the rest of the United States, approximately 85 per cent of our school children leave school to enter our industrial occupations before the age of sixteen. Here then lies our great problem in conserving national vitality. How

shall we reach these young boys and girls with the facts about individual health preservation and community protection against invasions of disease?

We must teach the children that it is an inevitable law of civilization that co-operative citizenship results in the growth of great cities where each individual citizen becomes merely a unit performing in return for his living, his share of the work necessary to the life of the whole. In the biological world the law of physiological division of labor operates similarly. The human body is made up of several millions of cells working together to accomplish the work of man.

New York City is estimated to have food supplies within its borders for less than forty-eight hours. Obviously, the defense of New York against an enemy depends quite as much on the protection of its contributing farms and its water supply as upon its harbor fortifications. The case is not different in the wars of the human body with disease. The food supply of the body is gathered from the markets of the world. Disease germs that may contrive to get into a food which is being shipped from Japan have only to keep alive during the vicissitudes of transportation until they pass the lips of the consumer in California in order to begin their battles for supremacy over the human body. It is not the primary purpose of these armies of disease to destroy the body, but to subjugate it, and to obtain for themselves a living at the expense of the body's cellinhabitants. Once the battle begins, however, no one can foresee whether the fierceness of the conflict may not result in the complete destruction of both defender and foe.

No city is well fortified which has not provided many methods of checking the advance of the enemy after the outer defenses have given way. It is necessary to remember thru all that may be said and printed about fighting disease thru public co-operation, that a normal, healthy, active body provides within itself the means for effectively resisting the attacks of these disease-producing germs ninety-nine times out of a hundred, even after they have succeeded in penetrating its outer defenses-the skin and mucous membranes. This failure one time in a hundred, however, is sufficient to cause annually approximately ten thousand deaths in California and upward of five hundred thousand each year in the United States. If we would hope to save year by year these ten thousand Californians from death and one hundred thousand more from lives of painful and needless invalidism, we must study the methods of the enemy and take the offensive. The two great resources of these enemies lie in their invisibility and their ability to multiply with incredible rapidity.

Science has demonstrated ways and means of preventing the more deadly of the disease-producing "germs" from reaching those members of a community whose physiological defenses will not protect them. It is for us as teachers to popularize these demonstrations of science, and to encourage effective work in their application to the localities in which