CONTENTS OF THE FIRST PARI' 
OP THE 
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
1869. 
Bvo, paper, $l.OO. 
Copies may be obtained from Messrs. Leypoldt Sf Holt, New York, or at dc Ojjict 0/ 
the Association, 13 Pemberton Square, Boston 
I. Historical Sketch of Social Science, Henry Villard. 
11. Inspection of Country Schools, John D. Philbrick. 
111. University Education, Goldwin Smith. 
IY. Texas Cattle Disease, John Stanton Gould. 
Y. Supervision of Public Charities, F. B. Sanborn, 
VI. Method of Diffusing Knowledge, Horace Greeley. 
VII. Protection of the Ballot, Charles Francis Adams, Jr, 
VIII. Civil Service Reform, Samuel Eliot. 
IX. Some Topics in Criminal Law, Henry W. Torrey. 
X. People’s Banks in Germany, Henry Villard. 
XL Progress in Economic Education. 
XII. Correspondence.—Economic Results of the Emancipation 
of Serfs in Russia, N. Tourgueneff. 
XIII. General Intelligence. 
1. Home. Extension of Public Libraries. Art in Educa- 
tion. Illinois Normal School System. Teachers’ Cer- 
tificates in California. Preservation of Infant Life. 
Asylums for the Insane. Free Markets. European 
Emigration. Financial Aspects of the United States. 
Prison Discipline. Census of 1870. How to observe 
the United States. 
2. Foreign. Art School for Women.—- French Views of 
Higher Education. Industrial Dwellings. The Fami- 
listere. People’s Kitchens. Cooperation in Railroad 
Management. Government Annuities and Insurance in 
Great Britain and France. 
XIV. Notices of Publications. 
Library of Education. Bibliotheque Nationale. Pro- 
ceedings of the International Statistical Congress. 
Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statis- 
tics of American Soldiers,. Public Parks. Rapport 
du Jury International de I’Exposition Universelle de 1867. 
XV. Officers and Members of the Association. American Social Science 3UsBtotiatton* 
CIVILIZATION 
AND 
HEALTH. 
READ BEFORE THE AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION AT THE 
LOWELL INSTITUTE, BOSTON, MARCH 1, 1870, 
BY 
Prop. FRANCIS BACON, M. D. 
PRINTED FOR THE AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, 
&t tljc Prc&S, CamSrftfiie, JHa&S. 
1870. CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
Read before the American Social Science Association, at the Lowell 
Institute, Boston, March Ist, 1870. —By Prof. Francis Bacon, M. D., of 
Yale College. 
There is a notion which rises sometimes even in thoughtful 
and educated minds in their dejected moods, and which perpetu- 
ates itself as a belief pretty extensively among the unthinking and 
ignorant, that we are living in times of great physical degeneracy; 
that the world is in its decay, and that we have had the misfortune 
to be produced in the decrepitude of Nature. It is suspected by 
some that the whole creation languishes, and that neither plants 
nor animals have the bulk or vigor of their ancestors, and that 
everything is daily sinking by gradual diminution. Though the 
process of deterioration is thus general, it is considered that in 
mankind the most striking failure of stature and strength and 
health and longevity is to be seen, and that this species has no 
brighter prospect, as things are now moving, than to go the way 
of those lamented fowls, the Dodo and the Great Auk. 
This opinion has the weight of great antiquity. The poetry of 
all ages is full of it. “ These degenerate days ” may be fixed, by 
the authority of contemporary writers, in almost every part of the 
historic period. Nor is it a fancy of the poets alone, for in what 
is left to us of the science of ancient Greece and Rome the same 
notion frequently recurs. I find in an old English author a pas- 
sage so exactly in point, that I cannot forbear to repeat it here. 
Dr. John Cains, a very learned man, the first of English physicians 
three hundred and twenty years ago, is trying to account for the 
“ sweating sickness ” of that time, one of the most fearful pesti- 
lences that ever visited any people. He says: “We are nowe a 
dales so unwisely fine, and womanly delicate, .... the olde 
manly hardness, and stoute courage, and peinfulnes of England is 
utterly driven awaye; insteade whereof men now a daies receive 
womanlines, and become nice, not able to withstande a blaste of 
wynde, or resist a poore fishe. And children be so brought up 
that if they be not all daie by the fire with a toste and butire, and 
in their furres, they be straight sick.” And he laments that peo- 2 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
pie no longer “ lyve quietlie, frlendlie, and merily one with another, 
as men were wont to do in the olde worlde, when this countrie 
was called merye Englande.” Yet in spite of these consuming 
vices, bringing swift destruction with them, that dreadful pest has 
gone, clean gone, and has been seen no more for these three cen- 
turies, and the English people remains —remains to be'scolded in 
the same round terms in this present year of grace; and to listen 
to tales of the lost prosperity and happiness of some golden age, 
fixed, if not wholly vague and dateless, in some period when, as 
Macaulay has said, in a passage familiar to all, “ noblemen were 
destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a 
modern footman ; when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on 
loaves, the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern 
workhouse; when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privi- 
lege reserved for the higher class of gentry ; when men died faster 
in the purest country air, than they now die in the most pestilential 
lanes of our towns; and when men died faster in the lanes of our 
towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.” 
Sagacious minds may have often suspected this cherished griev- 
ance of the ages to be an imaginary one, but only in recent times 
has it been possible to show authoritatively how unfounded it is. 
The gathering and recording of great masses of facts relating to 
the duration of human life is a modern practice. There is no 
continuous record of this sort running back quite four hundred 
years. The well-known and often quoted Geneva records are the 
oldest that we have. No one, probably, can see the result of those 
records stated for the first time without a sense of astonishment. 
They show us that in a period of three hundred years, the average 
term of life was lengthened from 21.21 years to 40.68 years, an 
increase of almost 100 per cent. So surprising a statement as this 
might well be received with suspicion, were it not that all the evi- 
dence that we have (and of later years it has accumulated enor- 
mously and with extreme particularity of detail) goes to corrob- 
orate it. The temptation is strong to set before you some of the 
impressive arithmetic of the subject, and leave it there, but “ the 
eloquence of figures ” addresses itself rather to sight than to 
hearing; and, besides, many of you must have seen a statement 
of the facts, at once full and exact, given in an article in late num- 
bers of the “ Atlantic Monthly.” 1 In short, we know that the ex- 
pectation of life for those born in Christendom is greater now than 
1 “The Increase of Human Life,” by Dr. Edward Jarvis. Atlantic Monthly, October, 
November, and December, 1869. CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
3 
ever before since history began to be written ; that life is better 
worth having now than ever before; that it is more respected, 
more fenced about with all safeguards of law, more secure. The 
growing reluctance to inflict death as a penalty, is a single indica- 
tion of this fact. So, more indirectly, is the growing intolerance 
of the existence of bodily pain. Where now could spectators be 
found for an auto dafe, or a crowd of connoisseurs of the torture- 
chamber ? Since the divine discovery of anaesthesia has shown us 
that the worst and most hopeless of pains are unnecessary and pre- 
ventable, we have had some education in this regard. It is still 
too early to estimate in full the moral effects of that discovery, nor 
is this the place to do it, but I shall scarcely be called fanciful for 
this suggestion of their importance. 
Admitting then, as we must, this steady increase in the term of 
human life coincident with the progress of our civilization, it be- 
comes us to know something in detail of the influences which 
have proved thus kindly and fostering. Can we simply say that 
all the new conditions to which man has been subjected in his 
progress from the primeval state up to the civilization of the pres- 
ent, have been to his advantage ? Far from it. Countless-myriads 
of men, some entire races, have been crushed and melted away in 
the working out of the great problem. “ The world,” says wise 
Sir Thomas Browne, “ that took but six days to make, is like to 
take six thousand years to make out, meanwhile old truths voted 
down begin to resume their places, and new ones arise upon us.” 
It is a slow process, our coming to a perfect understanding with 
Nature, so that, on the one hand, we take all that she has to give 
us, and get the good of it, and on the other hand, we do not inter- 
fere with her great changeless laws by our little housekeeping 
arrangements. Whenever we do this latter, whether by blunders in 
the way of our dwelling, or occupation, or food, or clothing, or med- 
icine, we invariably suffer for it. She will not be defrauded. The 
history of civilization is a recital of experiments that prove this. The 
human individual is an infinitely variable quantity, and it takes a 
great while to complete and determine important experiments upon 
him; so long sometimes that his own life is too short, and his heirs 
must carry ou the process after him. A much longer period is 
needed to get the final results of similar experiments upon the hu- 
man race. Now a steady succession of ever new experiments attends 
the progress of mankind, not only from absolute barbarism to civil- 
ization, but from one degree of civilization to another. When, for 
instance, the Irish people began to be fed with pure starch,— with 4 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
potatoes, that easily cultivated and prolific root was found to give 
great returns to the poorest husbandry in the cold and damp soil 
which had before reluctantly yielded scanty crops of rye and bar- 
ley. The people soon had a greater bulk of food than ever before 
to put into their stomachs, and the sense of distension thus pro- 
duced was satisfactory as replacing habitual emptiness. Popula- 
tion increased, not uniformly a symptom of prosperity, and the 
new and abundant food was regarded as a great boon to the im- 
poverished and ill-fed country. The potato gradually exterminated 
the grain crop. What the effect was then upon the health of the 
potato eaters, no one of that age seems to have observed. 
know now, for Majendie and Lehmann and Liebig have taught us, 
that this sort of feeding was no better than disguised starvation ; 
and, more recently, with the introduction of extensive potato cul- 
ture into new countries, New Zealand for example, we have 
had the opportunity of seeing how certain diseases of mal-nutri- 
tion have multiplied there. But the potato speedily became almost 
the sole food of Ireland, and nobody ventured to speak a disre- 
spectful word of the vegetable, until' Wm. Cobbett did, after two 
centuiies of its use ; and he was well known for a surly iconoclast 
and impracticable revolutionist, whom nobody regarded. So the 
experiment went on, and we know only too well what has come of 
it thus far. In other countries when wheat has failed, the poor, 
though sorely pinched, have made shift with barley and rye, and’ 
when these were gone, with buckwheat and roots; but where, in 
years of plenty, nothing stands between the people and death but 
the starvation diet of potatoes, what is the alternative when that 
fails ? This is the awful question that has been put again and 
again to the Irish in successive potato famines, and which, after a 
despairing attempt at answering it with poor pot-herbs, and dulse 
and tangle from the sea, they have “given up” by myriads. 
The potato played this people false, not merely by melting into 
rottenness beneath their grasp, but, more insidiously, by slowly 
sapping their physical and perhaps moral powers through genera- 
tions ; so that when the time of stress and struggle came, noth- 
ing was left in reserve of strength and courage, and the famine- 
typhus found them a passive prey.1 “ All analogy,” says Dr. 
1H arr, the Registrar-General of England, “ proves that no exten- 
l That sainUy man, Father Matthew, said in 1846, “On the 27th July, I passed from 
Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant har- 
vest. Returning 3d August, I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. 
In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their gardens, wringing 
their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.” 6 CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
5 
sive or permanent degeneration of a race can be accomplished in 
less than two of three generations. The great change is as slow 
and insidious as it is certain. It is rarely perceived by its victims, 
who remain rooted and benumbed on the spot, unless they and the 
community are aroused by sudden and terrible catastrophes. That 
angel which it would seem it has pleased the Almighty Creator and 
Preserver of mankind to charge with this dread mission, is the 
pestilence. Wherever the human race, yielding to ignorance, in- 
dolence, or accident, is in such a situation as to be liable to lose its 
strength, courage, liberty, wisdom, lofty emotions, the plague, 
fever, or cholera comes, not committing havoc perpetually, but 
turning men to destruction, and then suddenly ceasing, that they 
may consider. As the lost father speaks to the family, and the 
slight epidemic to the city, so the pestilence speaks to nations, in 
order that greater calamities than the untimely death of the popu- 
lation may be avoided,” We cannot say confidently yet, that we 
have seen the ultimate result of this potato experiment. 
Take an instance, again, in the case of another vegetable un- 
known to the Old World, American, too, like the potato, but this 
time a tremendous narcotic. 
Tobacco has been a factor in our civilization for about as long a 
time as the potato. Precisely what it has done to the human race, 
we are not yet authorized to say. Some of its effects are very 
subtle; but that it has had some great influence seems clear 
enough. When it is taken for the first time in a considerable dose, 
it produces symptoms which need not be described here, but of 
which we may safety say, that no physician could see them origi- 
nating in any case without alarm, if ignorant of the cause produ- 
cing them ; and, having such properties, this drug is consumed by 
the human family at the estimated rate of nearly one thousand 
millions of pounds a year. Its effects cannot fail to have been 
great, however uncertain, and we have some good reasons for be- 
lieving that in many cases they outlast the life of the individual in 
whom they are first manifested; that, for instance, what is impaired 
assimilation in the parent is arrested or perverted development in 
the child, that nervous irritability and hypochondria in the one 
becomes paralysis and insanity in the other; and, in short, that 
this tobacco experiment is one of those already spoken of, that can- 
not be carried through in a single individual or a single genera- 
tion. Undoubtedly posterity will know more about it than we do, 
and perhaps will wonder at our ignorance of what to them will be 
palpable facts. 6 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
Then, again, there are coffee and tea, still newer to our use. 
In the year 1610, Master George Sandys saw with astonishment 
in Constantinople the Turks “ sitting most of the day apd sipping 
of a drink called coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little 
china dishes, as hot as they can suffer it, blacke as soote, and 
tasting not much unlike it, which helpeth, as they say, digestion, 
and procureth alacrity.” And this, he speculates, is the gen- 
uine “ blacke broth ”of the old Spartans. In 1652 the first little 
parcel of it was brought to London and used. This present year, 
it is calculated, in Europe and America, something one hun- 
dred and fifty thousand tons is consumed (three hundred million 
pounds). September 25, 1661, the worthy Mr. Pepys, a great 
fancier of novelties, makes the important entry in Ins, diary : “ I 
did send for a cup of tea, a China drink, of which -I <fiave never 
drank before.” At the beginning of the last century the entire 
annual use of this “ China drink,” in Europe and America, did 
not amount to five hundred thousand pounds. Now it exceeds 
fifty millions. This is a wonderful change effected/m the diet of 
Christendom; a change not without potent and permanent results 
in the physical nature of man. Whether any of these are seen in 
the apparent increase of certain forms of nerve disorders is as yet 
mere matter of conjecture, concerning which much pigeon-holing 
of statistics remains to be done, before it can be admitted even as 
a substantial opinion. It is held by some of the judicious 
observers that these “ subsidiary foods,” as they hav§ been called, 
have done a real service to modern civilization by enabling the 
performance of forced labor, and the support of undue fatigue, and 
increasing the vital resistance to morbific poisons ; to say nothing 
of the view ingeniously urged by Lecky and others, that by 
“ checking the boisterous revels that had once been universal, and 
raising woman to a new position in the domestic circle, they have 
contributed very largely to refine manners, to introduce a new or- 
der of tastes, and to soften and improve the character of men.” 
The steadily increasing list of diseases of artificers, inconsider- 
able as the numbers may be that suffer from each one, is a perpet- 
ual reminder to us to keep our petty plans properly subordinated 
to the laws of Nature. We liberate the imprisoned powers of Na- 
ture, her phosphorus, her mercury, her arsenic, and press them 
into our service: they turn upon us and take toll of our blood and 
bones. Curiously minute is the subdivision of these diseases ; 
curiously exact their apportionment. The silk-weavers have 
theirs, there is another for the linen-weavers, and another for the CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
7 
cotton-weavers; painters have their sort of palsy and neuralgia, and 
type-setters theirs, and mirror-silverers theirs. The percussion- 
cap maker breaks out with certain eruptions, the match-dipper loses 
his jaw-bones. The blue dyer goes mad in one way, and the scar- 
let dyer in another, if we take EsquiroFs word for it. Even that 
little toy-balloon, which is a new delight of childhood, could not be 
invented and made without giving us a new disease in the persons 
of the makers. 
Time scarcely suffices even to hint at the effects upon mankind 
of the use of glass in building. This is assuredly entitled to rank 
among the greatest of the sort of experiments which we are consid- 
ering. The ingenious statement has been made that we have no 
o o 
natural grown men now : that, like unseasonable lettuces, they are 
all raised under glass. The alternative, however, is not between 
glass and open air, as this statement would suggest, but between 
good shelter with light and possible cleanliness, on the one hand, 
and bad shelter with darkness and inevitable filth on the other 
hand, as one need not travel many miles in the south of Ireland 
to find out. Even so far as the admission of air is concerned, we 
find practically that ventilation is better where plenty of glass is 
used in building, however tight the walls may be, than when it is 
left to chance filtration through the chinks of a mud hut. The in- 
creased cheapness of glass is one of the great material gains of our 
time. The repeal of the English window-tax marks a distinct ad- 
vance in the hygienic state of the English poor. If in the corn- 
laws the king came between the poor man and his bread, no less 
in the window-tax did he stand between him and the light of 
heaven; and so long as that statute endured, the subject might, 
without affectation or cynicism, urge the request of Diogenes to 
Alexander. 
In casting about for the causes which have produced the exten- 
sion of human life, we are struck with the fact that some destruc- 
tive agencies which make a great figure in history have been of 
variable activity, and that some have either for a long time com- 
pletely disappeared, or have been restricted within much narrower 
limits. Not to mention other ancient pestilences, of which the 
imperfect descriptions left to us only permit us to say that they 
were of enormous fatality, there are three great diseases, once of 
wide prevalence and of conspicuous destructiveness, the oriental 
plague, the scurvy, and the small-pox,—which have been compar- 
atively recently relegated to the past, so far as the best civilization 
of Christendom is concerned. What is the practical significance 8 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
of this statement, to onr own chances of life and health ? It is 
hard for us fully to realize ; we strain our minds in the attempt. 
It is easy to repeat the statistics of destruction, but few of us, I 
think, have the power to assimilate figures and convert them into 
emotions, as Defoe has done in his History of the Plague in Lon- 
don. I repeat some numerical statements of the ravages of the 
plague in Europe, taking by preference the more moderate, for the 
highest surpass our power of belief. When it appeared under 
the name of the “ Black Death,” in the middle of the 14th cen- 
tury, giving signs of peculiar malignity, it swept in about four years 
almost completely over the Continent, and destroyed, it is estimated, 
one fourth of the inhabitants. Venice lost one hundred thousand 
of her people ; Florence, sixty thousand; Siena, seventy thousand ; 
Avignon, sixty thousand ; London, one hundred thousand ; Nor- 
wich, fifty-one thousand ; and this mortality, in each case, was usu- 
ally produced within a year, sometimes in a few months. Though 
committing its most dreadful ravages among dense masses of popu- 
lation in the cities, the plague was by no means restricted to them : 
it spread through the open country as well, almost depopulating 
wide districts. The foundations of civil order were shaken ; prop- 
erty was abandoned, inheritance was forgotten, ungathered har- 
vests perished in the fields, ownerless herds died of starvation, ships 
with crews of corpses drifted through the Mediterranean, and thus 
famine was added to the pestilence. Though this destruction has 
never since been paralleled, the poison of the plague remained do- 
mesticated in many of the cities of Western Europe for centuries, 
not continually active, but always ready for favoring circumstances, 
and bursting out in virulent epidemics, at intervals of a few years. 
Just two hundred and five years ago, it slew in one year in the 
London of that time, not a third of her present size, sixty- 
eight thousand five hundred and twenty-six persons, and then disap- 
peared completely, and has scarcely been seen since in Christendom. 
How should we feel, how beyond all expression would our horror 
and consternation be, —if, here in Boston, in the coming four or six 
months, fifty thousand people should die of one disorder ? And 
yet to have the plague in a city in the Middle Ages meant just 
this : and such a loss of life implied more misery to the survivors 
and a greater interference with industry and social order than it 
would with us, because our municipal organization is higher, our 
sources of supply vastly greater, more varied, and more accessible, 
and our power of repair of social damages more active. 
I mentioned the scurvy as second of these obsolete diseases. It CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
9 
is a curiosity to us nowadays ; many physicians have never seen 
a case, and it has scarcely a foothold left anywhere, except on 
shipboard in voyages of unusual length and hardship, or in an ill- 
provisioned army, far from its base of supplies, or in some Gehenna 
of an Andersonville, or a Belle Isle. But “ during the 16th, 17th, 
and earlier part of the 18th century, the disease was endemic in 
towns, fortifications, camps, and armies.” “ Many thousands were 
often cut off within a few months in single armies and garrisons ; 
and it is probable that more seamen perished from scurvy alone 
than from all other causes combined, whether sickness, tempest, or 
battle.” Take almost any voyage at random out of Hakluyt or 
Purchas, as a specimen of what those old sailors had to suffer in 
this way. Vasco da Gama, in doubling the Cape of Good Hope, 
lost one hundred out of his crew of one hundred and sixty. 
Jacques Cartier, in sailing to Newfoundland, had at the last only 
three sound men left among his one hundred and ten. Drake, and 
Cavendish, and Hawkins, and Anson, and all that glorious com- 
pany, have the same dismal story to tell; but Cook, who sailed a 
little later, when men had grown wiser, brought home, after a three 
years’ voyage, a healthy crew, which, out of one hundred and 
twelve, had lost only one by disease. We know perfectly well 
now what all this history of destruction meant that it was sim- 
ply bad, ignorant, careless feeding. We know that a nation with- 
out a kitchen garden, like the English nation up to the reign of 
Henry VIII., must be consumed with scurvy. 
Everybody knows that the small-pox has greatly abated since 
the present century began, and everybody knows how that abate- 
ment has been effected. The majority of those who are enjoying 
the immunity which vaccination confers know that small-pox is an 
odious and troublesome nuisance, but very few of them know fully 
from what they have been saved, and how inadequate any grati- 
tude of theirs must be. We have got some idea of what the 
plague used to be : the small-pox was worse ! It was “ the most 
formidable and fatal of all the diseases that afflicted mankind,” say 
the cool statists. Its average annual death-rate, seventy years ago, 
in countries where it was most closely observed, was about three 
thousand to the million of population, and nearly one tenth of all 
who died, died from this disease. This would be at the rate, in 
Great Britain, at present, of more than sixty thousand deaths a year 
from small-pox. Many who did not die outright from it never 
recovered from its virulence, but were blinded, or deafened, or 
crippled, or thrown into lingering and fatal disorders. No watchful- 10 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
ness could guard against the infection, no bodily strength could 
resist it. The many centuries of its prevalence had not mitigated 
its baleful strength, nor impaired its power of propagating itself. 
Mankind lay an absolutely helpless prey before it, until Dr. Jenner, 
a name never to be pronounced without admiration and gratitude, 
introduced his wonderful discovery of vaccination. What have 
been the results of that ? It has failed thus far, owing to the igno- 
rance and slothfulness of men, to accomplish what Jenner devoutly 
believed it would, the extermination of small-pox from civilized 
society. We find, alas, that, upon the voluntary system, “ vaccina- 
tion can be maintained only by having small-pox constantly before 
our eyes.” Where vaccination has been compulsory and thorough, 
we find such facts as these, which might be accumulated to almost 
any extent. “In Copenhagen, in twelve years before the introduc- 
tion of vaccination, fifty-five hundred persons died of small-pox; 
fi om the year 1802 to 1818, a period of sixteen years after vaccina- 
tion had been made compulsory, only one hundred and fifty-eight 
persons died of small-pox over the whole kingdom of Denmark,” 
out of a population of two millions and a half. In England alone, 
at the present time, fifty-six thousand lives are saved by vaccina- 
tion each year. In view of such results as these, and of the de- 
voted and unstinted labor that produced them, well might Mr. 
Coleridge exclaim : “ Pronounce meditatively the name of Jenner, 
and ask, ‘ What might we not hope, what need we deem unattain- 
able, if all the time, the effort, the skill which we waste in mak- 
ing ourselves miserable through vice or error, and vicious through 
misery, were embodied and marshaled to a systematic war against 
the existing evils of nature ? ’ ” 
Besides these three great destroyers of man, which have thus 
abated, there are certain other diseases which, under the influence 
of improved modes of life, of increased medical skill, and of effi- 
cient preventive measures, have lost something of their ancient 
virulence, and no longer swell the bills of mortality as before. 
ases recognized as preventable, diseases which 
some time it will be disgraceful to have prevailing epidemically 
among us, is continually lengthening with the progress of inquiry 
into their causes; and the recent labors of your own Bowditch go 
far to add another, and one of the most intractable and destructive 
of all, to that list. 
Almost all those features that go to make the distinction of a 
modern city from an ancient one, are changes in the interest of 
health. The ancient city was a low and simple organization. CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
11 
Like one of those microscopic monsters whose only function seems 
to be to swallow what is next to it, it took in everything, and gave 
out nothing. The ancient cities and towns were fortresses, too, 
often having for their nucleus some still more ancient castle, built 
in a position naturally strong against an enemy, hut otherwise most 
inconvenient for human residence. The chief condition of con- 
tinuance for the thorp thus huddled together was to surround 
itself with a high, unbroken wall of strong masonry, lest it should 
be swept out of existence in a day by some enemy. The space thus 
fenced in would, in the usual course of affairs, become constantly 
more and more densely packed. Light and air were the costliest 
of luxuries. Streets were by preference narrow and crooked, as a 
defense against arrows and other missiles; sewerage generally un- 
known ; water supply commonly scanty, but perhaps sufficient for 
the limited use made of that fluid. Houses might crowd against 
o o 
each other, and encroach upon the streets, and throw out overhang- 
ing balconies and oriels and turrets, and rise to the height of a 
dozen stories, until the threadlike alleys below were completely 
shut in from sunlight. But with the city wall once built, no lat- 
eral expansion was possible for generations, or perhaps for centu- 
ries. The traveller still finds here and there a fragment left of 
such a city, towering grim and black, swarming with human life as 
with vermin, and oppressing the senses like a nightmare. These 
were the haunts of the mediaeval pestilences. When fairs and festi- 
vals drew the people of the country within the walls for a while, 
or when the invasion of an enemy drove them there in hurrying 
and terrified masses, the accumulated materials of disease fer- 
mented and exploded in epidemics, destroying burgher and peasant 
alike. So it was at Jerusalem, when Titus penned up within its 
walls more than a million of people. Mannteus, son of Lazarus, 
did not stay to see the end, nor even the height of the pestilence, 
but fled to the besieging Romans when he had counted 115,880 
dead brought out to be cast down through one gate, which he had 
kept from April to July. This was time of war and of unparal- 
leled destruction, but even in peace and prosperity, in some, and 
probably in most, of these old cities, men died faster than they 
were born, and it was only by continuous absorption from without 
that the city could grow or even continue. Every city that dates 
its origin even a few' centuries back has to struggle against this 
original vice of conformation. When, after a long period of pros- 
perity and freedom from fear of invasion, the grim old city wall 
comes down which has so long shut in the people from the sight 12 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
of the open fields, and shut out the free breezes and the sunlight 
from the streets and houses, it not only illustrates the disappear- 
ance of the old conditions of civic life and the progress of new ideas, 
but it makes a blessed epoch in the sanitary state of the old intra- 
mural city. The engorged mass of humanity in the centre begins 
to stir, and to disperse at its edges into the belt of gardens beyond 
the old wall. The worst of the swarming old houses come down, 
the narrow and crooked streets slowly widen and straighten, and 
the sunlight, first and most genuine of disinfectants, strikes in 
for the first time in a thousand years. “ Ring out,” says Mr.Ten- 
nyson to the Christmas bells, 
“ King out old shapes of foul disease,” 
but there are some of these shapes that should appropriately 
take their leave to a salvo of improved artillery. The first flash 
of Friar Bacon’s explosive announced the disappearance of the 
walled cities of the old time, more remotely but none the less 
surely than the blast of Joshua’s trumpets did the fall of Jericho. 
The old frowning battlements have given place to trim green earth- 
works, as daintily kept as a flower-garden, and, in time of peace, 
as free from all suspicion of danger. 
Many, indeed most of our American cities are free from those 
faults of plan and structure which we see more ancient towns re- 
taining as their inheritance from obsolete forms of civic life. Sooth 
to say, the spectacle of avenues and boulevards surpassing in 
grandeur those of modern Paris, staked out upon an otherwise un- 
broken prairie, with a place here for a university and there for a 
grand opera-house, and so on, has provoked unseemly levity on 
the part of the censorious traveler. And yet the want of some 
such happy union of the prophetic with the practical, has been the 
source of unnumbered inconveniences and detriments to the older 
communities. 
Our American towns have their own peculiar obstacles to over- 
come in their progress toward that ideal low death-rate, which 
should be the ambition of every good citizen. The shameful reck- 
lessness of those who make haste to be rich,— a larger class here 
than elsewhere, and that fatal and benumbing faith in the in- 
herent tendency of all sorts of social mischiefs to turn good of 
themselves, which almost seems a national vice, are but two of 
these obstacles. The great American cities have had, besides, a 
very difficult and nearly unique problem set for them to solve, 
namely, to receive and to assimilate great hordes of people who 
are, in the first place, new to the climate, and liable to some special CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
13 
dangers on that score (for acclimation is needed from east to west, 
as well as from north to south) ; who are, secondly, unused to and 
ignorant of the conditions of city life, and have neither acquired in 
their own persons, nor inherited at their birth, that kind of assue- 
tude to those artificial conditions which is in itself a partial protec- 
tion against their ill effects ; and who are, thirdly, to a very great 
extent, bad representatives of even the low form of civilization 
which has originated them, and who are not easily weaned from 
all the vices of ignorance and habitual dependence. Thousands 
of people come annually into all our great cities, bringing with 
them the rude, ignorant, uncleanly habits, the ineptitude of learn- 
ing new ways, the impatience of restrictions, the inflexibility of 
temperament, and, I will add, the low vitality, which belong to 
simple forms of pastoral and agricultural life. All their lives long 
they have been taken care of after a fashion, work has been pro- 
vided for them, and they have been set to do it; they have never 
learned the lesson of independence. So the virgin forest and the 
unbroken soil of the prairie call to them in vain ; they will swarm 
in where population is already thickest, crowd the rats out of the 
vilest cellars, and run up the majorities for ruffian aldermen and 
the class zymotid in the mortuary reports, in a way that makes 
shallow people who write for the English newspapers wonder at 
the degeneracy of the American people. Nowhere out of this 
country does this incubus so crush and throttle civic life ; but even 
in English cities the name of “ Irish quarter ” is a synonym for 
filth and disease. 
In the history of almost every considerable modern town, there 
comes a critical and dangerous period. It has ceased to be a rural 
community, its population has become close, perhaps even crowded ; 
but those public works, and that strict police, and that sense of 
individual responsibility in the people, which are indispensable 
conditions of civic welfare, have not yet been established. The 
ample gardens which the elder citizens remember as once surround- 
ing every house, have been divided and subdivided into narrow 
lots, and each lot has its buildings. Successive series of sinks and 
cess-pools have been used until the saturated earth about them 
would no longer imbibe their contents; then they have been 
abandoned and forgotten, and again new ones have been made. 
Complaints begin to be heard, perhaps, about the once excellent 
water of the wells. The tea-kettle gets incrusted in an un- 
sightly way after a few days’ boiling, and the soap curdles in 
the wash-tub. But this does not of necessity happen either, for 14 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
water sometimes becomes most dangerously polluted and yet re- 
mains clear, sparkling, and inoffensive to any of the senses. Thus, 
recently, at Bedford, England, Professor Miller found the very 
porous, gravelly subsoil completely honey-combed with alternate 
wells and cess-pools, the contents of each rising and falling with the 
level of the adjacent river, while the people continued to enjoy 
their excellent well-water, and wondered why they should die so 
with the typhoid fever. Some new comer in our thriving town 
tries to dig a new well for his house, and in the attempt opens into 
some ancestral cess-pool. If he is one of those irritable and im- 
placable spirits, who are the ferment and purification of small and 
sluggish communities, he moves in a spasm of disgust to have some 
distant water brought for the supply of the town, gets it analyzed 
and declared purer than Croton or Cochituate (in every case, so far 
as I have observed), and carries his point at last, to the great in- 
dignation of the old inhabitants, who declare that the longevity of 
their fathers, who drank that well-water before them, was unpar- 
alleled, that they themselves have had time in sixty years’ use of it 
to find out if it was bad, and that, aqueduct or no aqueduct, they 
will drink it while they live. 
About this time there comes some sudden outburst of typhoid 
fever, or of intractable dysentery, the like of which the town has 
never known before. The water-works party, who have expected 
their achievement to be nothing short of the regeneration of the 
town, are dismayed ; their conservative antagonists have at least 
the melancholy satisfaction peculiar to the conservative mind under 
such circumstances. Some clever man with a turn for investiga- 
tion takes up the case, and finds that a river has been brought into 
the town, and distributed over and into the soil without any ar- 
rangements for carrying it out again; that the mass of organic 
waste matter which has slowly infiltrated into the earth during 
many years, has been quickened to pernicious activity by the satu- 
ration of that earth with moisture ; that some of those who have 
discontinued the use of their wells have calmly turned the waste- 
pipes of their houses into them, to the certain empoisonment of 
their conservative neighbors, wrho won’t use the aqueduct water. 
And, while he is in the way of investigating, he looks a little 
further, and he finds a good many pigs stied in the thick of the 
town, and some shocking performances in and about two or three 
rival slaughter-houses ; and in some of the oldest and shabbiest 
houses, which have light and air shut out from them by later and 
loftier erections, he finds that the poor foreign people who work in CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
15 
the mills and on the railroad have got up a surprisingly close im- 
itation of the sixth ward in New York. And if he goes into the 
schools and looks at the childrens’ arms, he will be sure to find a 
large proportion of them unvaccinated, and the pabulum for an- 
other pestilence thus kept ready for it whenever chance shall bring 
it that way. And he will find that all these things are, and are 
steadily accumulating and intensifying because, as the people say, 
the town is a small place, and is not to be governed by the same 
restrictions that are necessary in great cities. “ Are we a sea or 
a whale that thou settest a watch over us ? ” O the struggles 
before this town can get itself sewered! O the next to impossibil- 
ity of making householders use the sewers when they are laid! O 
the internecine strife over the slaughter-houses ! O the heart- 
burnings upon the pig question ! Each one of the butchers is a 
selectman, several of the pig proprietors are deacons, and all are 
voters. What Spartan standing at bay for the dung-hills ! What 
fervor of eloquence about natural rights and oppressive legislation! 
Our hardy reformers find themselves face to face with a desperate 
banditti, contesting every inch of the ground ; not those wild fel- 
lows with sugar-loaf hats and cocks’-plumes, the terror of Italian 
roadsides and the delight of romantic childhood, Beppo, Tonio, Ri- 
naldo, and all the names ending in o ; but those others with names 
beginning with a great O, the less picturesque, but more formi- 
dable brigands of our own back alleys. This most persuasive 
dysentery, this thrice cogent typhoid fever must come again and 
again before their solicitations are fully heeded. It is the order 
of these divine messengers to make “ not a perpetual havoc, but 
to turn men to destruction, and then suddenly to cease, that they 
may consider.” 
The case that I have put is not an imaginary one. Just such 
cases are presented frequently to students of the public health, 
with details most curious, varied, and instructive. At this moment 
there are, within cannon-shot of New York, two suburban villages, 
lovely for situation, conspicuous for their semi-rural beauty, skirted 
with princely villas, and intersected with ranges of comfortable and 
even elegant houses, whose annual death-rate is exceeded only by 
the very worst parts of the neighboring metropolis. In England 
the keen-scented inspectors to Her Majesty’s Privy Council find 
the most exemplary collections of filth, the most incredible over- 
crowding, and consequently the most startling explosions of certain 
epidemics, not in London, nor Manchester, nor even in ill-famed 
Liverpool, but here and there in neglected towns of moderate size. 16 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
and even in little agricultural hamlets. In Greenock, for instance, 
eight years ago, they looked into the lodging-places of about 
four thousand working people, not selecting the worst localities, but 
taking a fair average, and they found that three quarters of these 
people “ were living under conditions which could not be permit- 
ted in the worst parts of London.” In London, a space of four 
hundred cubic feet has come to be recognized as the minimum 
allowance for each human being, and anything less is called intol- 
erable. But here many were living day and night, in less than 
one hundred cubic feet, and some “ in a space about the size of a 
street cab apiece,” without the freedom of ventilation which that 
vehicle possesses. “ After what has been said as to the construc- 
tion of houses, the crowding of rooms, the general dirtiness and 
the retention of foul matters, the statement is almost superfluous 
that in every poor man’s room in Greenock the atmosphere is 
fetid, the singular variety of stench being as remarkable as its 
general intensity,” observes the inspector, and he is a connoisseur 
of stenches. What wonder either, that two destructive fevers 
typhus and typhoid were thoroughly domesticated there ? What 
inhabitant had a better right ? It was noticeable here that the 
over-crowding in Greenock was not only among the vicious or the 
utterly poor, but that industrious and well paid workmen occupied 
these dens and paid high rent for them in the absence of any better 
lodgment. Well may Mr. Simon, the medical officer of Her Maj- 
esty’s Privy Council, stop amid his labors to heave a sigh and to 
remark: “ Though my official point of view is one exclusively 
physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this 
evil should not be ignored. For where overcrowding exists in its 
sanitary sense, almost always it exists even more perniciously in 
certain moral senses. In its higher degrees it almost necessarily 
involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion . . . 
as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences 
is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those 
on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under 
its curse it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond 
measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced 
should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civil- 
ization which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness, and 
enhances the self-respect which it betokens.” 
Take another case, still more strikingly illustrative of the point 
that I make. Three years ago, in the little strictly agricultural 
village of Terling, in Essex, numbering only nine hundred inhab- CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
17 
itants, in two months’ time three hundred people sickened with ty- 
phoid fever, and forty-one of them died. “ That is to say, the one 
preventable disease killed in that short time a larger proportion of 
the population than all causes of death put together ought to have 
killed there in two years.” Any expert knows full well what he 
may expect to find when such a case as this is reported. There 
was a miserably lodged and shamefully overcrowded people, living 
amid piles of filth upon a spongy soil saturated with filth, and draw- 
ing their water from wells sunk in that soil. All causes, all foster- 
ing conditions of that great disease of crowd and filth, were as 
strongly focussed in this hamlet as they could possibly be in the 
heart of the greatest city. 
Sometimes, indeed not unfrequently, we see the same causes 
operating with equal intensity on a still smaller scale. Some lonely 
farm-house, or some villa standing in the midst of its own grounds, 
has half its inmates stricken with fever, and investigation reveals 
some unsuspected domestic depot of contamination which has es- 
caped from its bounds, or has had its fatal energies roused by some 
chemical or organic stimulus. We have constantly in our blood 
poisons which will first benumb, and shortly slay us outright if we 
do not get rid of them; and after we are free of them, they may 
do a like mischief to other people unless they are set to do some- 
thing else, and are thus deprived of their harmfulness. As we 
have already seen, it is not only when men are massed in great 
numbers that they suffer more or less directly from the effect of 
these poisons. Nor, on the other hand, is it inevitable, when they 
are thus massed, as in great cities, that they should suffer from 
these effects. Some large districts in London, some considerable 
districts even in New York, show a death-rate scarcely exceeding 
that of the most salubrious rural districts. It is clear that the 
great city of the future is to be a place where life is as long and as 
secure as anywhere else, and where physical development and 
health is as great in degree, however it may differ in kind, from 
that of the agricultural regions. 
For to be in health does not imply a certain definite amount of 
muscular development, or a fixed degree of activity of the digestive 
or assimilative functions. Economically viewed, health is that state 
in which a person exists fully able, without suffering, to do what he 
has to do. There are various sorts of being in health, and each sort 
has its special usefulness. The plough-boy would not be helped in 
his vocation by having the brain and nerves of Emerson, nor does 
the poet need the brute muscularity of Heenan. Lord Brougham 18 
CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
and Mr. Gladstone, Graf von Bismarck and Count Cavour, Mr, 
Webster and Mr. Stanton, these men all astonish us with their en- 
durance and power of labor through days and sleepless nights, year 
in, year out. But give any one of them Patrick’s day’s work of turf- 
cutting to do, and his mess of potatoes to do it on, or put him at 
Hans’ plough-tail with the customary black crag of pumpernickel as 
a basis of operations, or let him take his turn with Sambo at the 
morning hoe-cake and the day-long swing of the cotton-hoe, and 
any one of those adscripti glebce would leave him out of sight in the 
second hour. No—these men have served to them the choicest 
cuts from the stalled ox, fishes from the deep sea five hundred 
miles away, game from the distant mountains, fruit and vegetables 
from the forcing-house, tea and coffee from the antipodes, wine 
that has twice doubled the Cape, and nothing of all this is idle ex- 
cess. It is all pure use. The mountainous accumulation of busi- 
ness, the watchful hostility of the opposition, the apathy and hesi- 
tation of friends, these are to them what the sight of the familiar 
course is to the thorough-bred race-horse, a stimulus and an 
added power. But take any one of that other set of workers and 
increase his daily toil by a fraction, and add to that toil anxiety, 
and harry his nights with unrest, and what comes of it? Very 
shortly, what we have seen come to an over-driven and abused ox, 
a creature patient and enduring up to a certain point, but slow and 
not to be hurried ; he shows first, by irrational but most pathetic 
signs, that he vaguely feels that everything is wrong, and then, 
after a brief fury, he breaks down completely and hopelessly, and 
there is no rallying his broken forces. 
I have taken exti’eme cases, by way of illustration, but there are 
infinite gradations between. Probably every medical officer of much 
experience in the late war had frequent occasion to observe, on a 
great scale, how huge-limbed and innocent-faced giants from the 
forests of Maine and the wheat-lands of the West would peak and 
pine, and give way to homesickness and the chronic ailments of the 
camp, and be overdone with picket-duty at night, and break down 
upon forced marches; while men of less bulk and stature and of 
paler skins, skilled workmen from factories, mechanics, and even 
clerks from the large towns, would take the same unaccustomed 
tasks with a cheerful alacrity, and endure them with hardihood, 
seeming none the worse for them when they were finished, but 
“ coming up smiling ” at the end, to use the expressive phrase of 
the prize-ring. The common opinion is that the quietude of an 
agricultural life, its freedom from civic turmoil, are peculiarly favor- CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
19 
able to mental health and serenity, and that it is in the stir and 
uproar of cities that men lose their wits. Study the records of our 
insane asylums, and see how far the reverse of this is true, and how 
wisely Goethe spoke when he said that nothing brings us nearer 
insanity than holding ourselves aloof from others; and nothing pre- 
serves the even tenor of the understanding so well as a general 
o o 
intercourse with many people. And yet we are in the way of say- 
ing that the lumberman and the farm-laborer live natural lives, and 
that the town-dwellers live artificial lives. But there is as much 
idle and delusive talk about natural and unnatural modes of life as 
we have seen there is about health. It is natural for man, is it 
not, to gather food and to store it away, and to cook it with fire, 
and to season it with grateful condiments, —to collect a vast va- 
riety of substances for clothing and for ornament, and to fabricate 
and wear them, to build a covert against the weather, and then 
a more comfortable and enduring dwelling, and then perhaps a 
mansion of splendor and delight, —to find out laws and govern 
himself by them, to surround himself with safety and strength and 
beauty. 
What we call our sense of comfort is, when unperverted, sim- 
ply our instinctive appreciation of those things and conditions 
which are most suitable for us, most conducive to our bodily wel- 
fare. Comforts are added strengths. The etymology of the word 
“ comfort ” hints at its true physiological significance ; a signifi- 
cance which we cannot afford to overlook —an ascetic contempt 
of which, originating in ignorance and morbid conceit, and formu- 
lating itself in eccentric systems of dietetics and regimen, has at 
times wrought great mischief, and nowhere, perhaps, more con- 
spicuously in our own time, than here in New England. Tiie 
school-boy Shelley may declaim against the cooking of food, and 
Rousseau may denounce the brutality of eating meat, and we can 
still enjoy the poetry of one and the speculations of the other; but 
when pretended teachers, with nothing of Shelley except his green- 
sickness and his inexperience, and nothing of Rousseau but his 
audacity, delude ignorant youth into dyspepsia and consumption, 
it is time to interfere. 
These cities of the future, with sunlight and fresh air and 
pure water coming to every citizen ; with no man standing in his 
neighbor’s way ; with no noisome or pernicious occupation suffered 
within their limits; with all rain-fall and water-waste carried 
quickly away to the unharmed river, while all other refuse, at once 
more dangerous and valuable, goes with due dispatch to the hungry CIVILIZATION AND HEALTH. 
soil; with order and cleanliness and beauty in all the streets; with 
preventable diseases prevented ; and with inevitable ones skillfully 
cared for; with the vigilant government that does not stand apart 
and look coldly at ruthless greed and needy ignorance, and utter 
only an indifferent “ Caveat emptor,” but says to the butcher, 
“ This trichinous pork, this pathological beef, goes to the render- 
ing-vat, and not into the mouths of ray children ; ” and to the 
brewer, “ Burn this cocculus indicus and lobelia, and let me see 
no bitter but hops hereafter ; ” and to the apothecary, “ Successor 
of Herod, you shall not poison my infants at wdiolesale with your 
narcotic ‘ soothing syrups ” and to the water company, “Your 
reservoir shows foulness this week to my microscope and my test- 
tube : let it continue at your peril,” these cities of the minimum 
death-rate, shall they not be our cities ? Are these things of im- 
practicable costliness, say you ? Nothing is so cheap as health ; it 
is the truest economy; it is cheaper than dirt. “ Dirt cheap ” 
what an abuse of language ! Dirt means waste and disease, death, 
widowhood, orphanage, pauperism, high taxation, costly produc- 
tion. Nothing costs so much. Besides, the objection, even if it 
were not unfounded, is unworthy. “ All parsimony in war is 
murder,” is the judicious maxim of the Marshal de Belleisle. Not 
less, I say, when we fight against an impersonal foe of mankind. CONTENTS OF THE SECOND PART 
OP THE 
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
1870. 
Bvo, paper, $1.50. 
Copies may he obtained from Messrs. Leypoldt Sp Holt, New York, or at the. Office of 
the Association, 13 Pemberton Square, Boston. 
Current Record of the Association. 
I. Immigration, Friedrich Kapp. 
11. The American Census, James A. Garfield. 
111. The Mode of Procedure in Cases of Contested 
Elections, Henry L. Dawes. 
IY. The Public Charities of the State op New York, 
Theodore W. Dwight. 
V. The Public Libraries op the United States, Ainsworth 
R. Spofford. 
YI, The Science oE Transportation, Joseph D. Potts. 
VII. Vaccination. A Report pi'esented by Francis Bacon, Wil- 
liam A. Hammond, and David F. Lincoln. 
VIII. The Election of Presidents, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. 
IX. Life Insurance, Sheppard Homans. 
X. The Administration op Criminal Justice, George C. 
Barrett. 
XL Health Laws and their Administration, Elisha Harris. 
XII. An International Code, D. D. Field. 
XIII. General Intelligence. 
1. Home. Social Reform Movements in the United States. 
Art in Education. Progress in Higher Education. 
International Congress on Criminal Law Reform and 
Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline. A National 
Collegiate and Musical Conservatory for the Blind. Rail- 
way Commissions. State Charities. Deaf-Mute In- 
struction. State Boards of Health. Hospitals for the 
Insane. Prison Reform. Statistics of Libraries in the 
United States. Railroad Libraries. 
2. Foreign. Annual Meeting of the British Association 
for the Promotion of Social Science. Reforms in Popular 
Education in Europe. British Mining Legislation. 
Congress of British Trades-Unions. Statistics of People’s 
Banks of Germany.—The National Association of Ger- 
man Economists. Programme of the Frederick William 
University at Berlin. 
XIV. Constitution. 
XV. List of New Members. 
XVI. List op Works relating to Social Science published 
in 1869. AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION. 
The American Social Science Association was organized in 
the fall of 1865, after the model of the British Association for the Pro- 
motion of Social Science. The objects of the Association are ; 
To aid the development of Social Science, and to guide the public 
mind to the best practical means of promoting the Amendment of 
Laws, the Advancement of Education, the Prevention and Repression 
of Crime, the Reformation of Criminals, the Furtherance of Public 
Morality, the Adoption of Sanitary Regulations, and the Diffusion 
of Sound Principles on Questions of Economy, Trade, and Finance. 
To bring together the various societies and individuals now inter- 
ested in these objects, for the purpose of obtaining, by discussion, the 
real elements of Truth, by which doubts are removed, conflicting opin- 
ions harmonized, and a common ground afforded for treating wisely the 
social problems of our times. 
The labors of the Association are carried on in four Departments : 
I. Education. 
11. Public Health. 
111. Economy, Trade, and Finance. 
IV. Jurisprudence and the Amendment of Laws. 
Each Department is under the direction of professionally qualified 
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General Meetings, at which papers, bearing upon all Departments, 
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The Science of Society stands, from its very nature, more than any 
other, in need of associated labor. Its aim being the promotion of 
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insure the greatest human happiness, reflecting men and women must 
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In order to facilitate this commerce of minds, a Central Bureau has 
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tion. 
The experience of five years has • fully convinced the members of 
the Association that it was not instituted a moment too soon in this 
preeminently progressive country, whose very intense vitality and rapid 
development call for safe guidance by Right and Truth. It is this firm 
conviction that leads us to ask anew the cooperation of all engaged in 
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The Annual Subscription is Five Dollars. All the publications of 
the Association,including the “ Journal of Social Science,” are furnished 
gratuitously to members. . . 
Letters should be addressed to the Office of the Association, 13 
Pemberton Square, Boston. 
HENRY YILLARD, Secretary. SAMUEL ELIOT, President.